World, in brief

Weapons stores running down

The US defence department's auditor found shortages of advanced missiles and bottlenecks in the factories meant to replace them. [1] Ukraine's commanders say Russia mass-produces jet-powered drones while their own interceptors still crash in testing. [21] The US is preparing to sell Israel 40,000 two-thousand-pound bombs. [11]

Attacks on oil routes

A tanker called the El Gaia was attacked in the Strait of Hormuz and two of its crew are missing. [12] Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, which was carrying 4 to 5 million barrels a day around that strait, is shut after a drone strike. [16] Brent crude, the main world oil price, traded near $108 a barrel. [42]

Dearer oil reaching households

Japan's import bill rose 28% in a year and it has now run a trade deficit for four months straight. [35] India's rupee fell to its weakest in over a month as oil climbed. [43] Prices across Nigeria have risen sharply since its government scrapped the fuel subsidy in 2023. [45]

Governments facing angry voters

In Berlin the Left Party leads the far-right AfD by 21% to 18% before Sunday's state election. [29] Nigerians living in displacement camps near Abuja say they want change before the 2027 election. [45] US state and local election officials are rehearsing for disputed counts in November. [49]

One pressure seen across the day runs through World too.

• Fuel and shipping routes shut by the warHigh ↑ · seen in 4 beats→

1. 1The US war on Iran has cost $38bn and left it short of missiles, two official reports say
2. 2Republican files impeachment articles against Hegseth
3. 3US prepares to sell Israel 40,000 heavy bombs
4. 4Tanker attacked in Hormuz, two crew missing
5. 5Houthis hit a Saudi airbase, Saudi strikes kill three

The US defence department's inspector general -- its own independent auditor -- published its first report on the Iran war on Monday, and it says the fighting has left the US with "strategic inventory shortfalls" in advanced weapons. [1][3][6]

Watch the $87.6bn the Trump administration asked Congress for in June and has not been given: the budget office says the war-related part of that request is about 10% larger than the war has actually cost so far. [4]

Thomas Massie, a Republican member of the US House of Representatives, read articles of impeachment against defence secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday. [8]

He accused Hegseth of waging war without the approval of Congress, of carrying out killings outside any court, and of paying little attention to civilian deaths. [8]

Massie has been the loudest Republican critic of the war on Iran and is trying to force a vote his own party is expected to bury. [8]

It is the first attempt to remove the man running the war, and it comes from President Trump's own party rather than from the opposition.

It lands the same week two official reports contradicted what he has said about weapons stocks.

The Trump administration has informally told congressional committees it plans to sell Israel 40,000 two-thousand-pound bombs in a $2.8bn deal paid for with US aid money. [9][11]

Half are Mark 84 bombs and half are bunker-busting versions built to punch through concrete. [11] Reuters reported a wider munitions package worth $3.6bn. [10]

Senator Chris Van Hollen said he would try to block it. [9]

Israel has used these bombs hundreds of times in Gaza and Lebanon, including in areas it had told civilians were safe. [9]

The sale also draws down the same US stockpiles the US defence auditor has just called short.

Oman said two sailors are missing and 23 were rescued from the Panama-flagged tanker El Gaia, which was attacked about 2.4km north of the Musandam peninsula and towed to an Omani port after a fire in its engine room. [12]

Iran's Revolutionary Guards said the ship hit a naval mine on a route they call unsafe. [12]

The US military said Iran struck it with a missile last month and a drone at the weekend. [12]

The UN's shipping body counts 22 seafarers killed in 79 confirmed incidents in the strait and the wider region since February. [12]

The crews doing the dying are hired hands on ships flying flags of convenience, and no government is answering for them.

Also seen in Finance, Food and Tech.

Yemeni officials said Houthi fighters hit Khamis Mushait airbase in southern Saudi Arabia with missiles and drones, damaging hangars, radar, runways and ammunition stores. [13]

The Houthis, the armed movement that controls most of northern Yemen, said it was payback for Saudi-led strikes. [13]

A Houthi-run health ministry spokesman said Saudi air strikes killed three people in Taiz province, two of them children; the Associated Press said it could not verify that. [14]

Saudi Arabia says it will respond firmly, so each side is now answering the last strike with another one. [15]

Gulf share indexes fell on the news, with Dubai's main index down 0.8%. [13]

New satellite pictures show major damage to the pumping stations on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, the 1,200km line that carries crude across the peninsula and out through the Red Sea. [15]

It had been moving 4 to 5 million barrels a day -- about 4% of world supply -- while the Strait of Hormuz stayed shut. [16]

US energy secretary Chris Wright said it would be back in days; trade analysts at Kpler put the repair at four to six weeks. [16][15]

The oil under the sand has not changed; how much of it reaches buyers now depends on how fast spare parts arrive.

Satellite images also show damage to King Khalid Air Base from a Houthi strike last week. [15]

Countries count the missiles in store, and find out only by fighting how many years it takes their factories to build that many again.

Russia began mass-producing jet drones months ago and Ukraine's interceptors still crash in testing, so the contest is over build speed rather than design

the crude under the sand has not changed, and how much reaches buyers now depends on how fast spare parts arrive for the broken pumps

memory chips are already scarce, so a stoppage at one plant bites straight away because no rival can raise output in the time it would take

buyers are paying to add factory capacity years before they need the chips, because a plant cannot be started once the shortage has arrived

So is anyone who has been told their new car, their boiler part or their hospital appointment is six months away.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman flew to Cairo and met Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, and both said they were committed to free and safe shipping in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb strait at its southern end. [17]

Neither gave any detail of what either country would actually do. [17] Egypt is unlikely to send forces, but it talks to every side in the region, including Iran. [17]

Saudi Arabia has asked the US for direct military help and been refused. [16]

Looking for Arab political cover instead is what a country does when the ally it counted on has said no.

US Central Command said its forces opened fire on and destroyed two small Iranian boats that tried to seize an unmanned American surface vessel off Iran's coast. [18]

The craft is a Saildrone, about eight metres long, which sails itself and has been used to watch shipping in the region for years. [18]

Iranian state media said two fishing boats were attacked in Hormozgan province and several fishermen were missing. [18]

The two accounts describe the same event as a theft attempt and as an attack on fishermen, and there is no independent witness to either.

The US says all its surface drones are accounted for. [18]

Brigadier-General Andrii Biletskyi said Ukraine's third army corps has launched an offensive in the north of the Donetsk region, clearing 75 square kilometres of Russian infiltration groups and retaking a further 10. [19]

Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, has been the heaviest fighting of the war for more than four years. [19] Biletskyi has commanded the defence in that area since last month. [19]

Ukraine has spent most of this year defending rather than attacking, so a push of this size is a change of posture.

It also arrives while both governments are talking about pausing strikes on each other's power and fuel.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine will stop attacking Russian infrastructure only if the US can guarantee Russia is genuinely ready to stop attacking Ukraine's. [20]

He accused Russia of deliberately hitting food, energy and water supplies. [20]

Russian strikes have left thousands of Ukrainian households without power or heating for three winters running, and a fourth is weeks away. [20]

Trump said on Monday the two sides had agreed to stop hitting each other's energy sites; this is the first thing either government has said about it, and it is a condition rather than a yes.

Russia increased its use of jet-powered drones roughly sixfold over three months this summer, according to Ukrainian military data seen by Reuters. [21]

Ukraine's own interceptor drones proved hard to control above 400km/h and some crashed into fields and forests during tests. [21]

Maksym Zhorin, a deputy corps commander, wrote that Russia had set up mass production of jet Shahed drones "and we don't even know what to do about them". [21]

Ukraine's air defences were already thin for the winter, and a faster drone arrives before an interceptor can reach it.

The bottleneck is how quickly each side can manufacture, not who has the better design.

Ukraine's state railway company believes a Russian drone that struck a train near the Polish border may have been aimed at a diplomatic service. [22]

Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson and former US general David Petraeus had travelled the same route on an earlier train that day. [22]

The attack has brought calls for NATO, the military alliance of 32 mostly European and North American countries, to shoot drones down over Ukraine itself. [22]

Rail is how almost every foreign visitor reaches Ukraine, because the airspace is closed. If those trains are targets, the diplomacy has to move or stop.

Denmark accused a Russian frigate of firing two emergency flares at a Danish air force Fennec helicopter that was photographing it in international waters off Gedser on Monday, with one flare passing close by. [23]

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the act reckless and said it was meant to intimidate and divide. [23] Russia has not commented, and Denmark has summoned its ambassador. [23]

Foreign minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said Russia is gradually shifting what it treats as acceptable behaviour. [23] The same day, NATO jets shot down a drone over Lithuania.

The US State Department told Congress it will move $52m of foreign military financing away from Slovakia, North Macedonia, Tunisia and Iraq, and give it to Panama, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. [24]

That money is US taxpayer cash which the receiving country spends on American-made weapons. [24]

Secretary of State Marco Rubio had visited Colombia, Ecuador and Peru the week before and promised them more support. [24]

Slovakia and North Macedonia are NATO members, so this cuts allies inside the alliance to pay for partners outside it.

The department said the money would fight drug trafficking and help secure the Panama Canal. [24]

Massad Boulos, President Trump's senior adviser on Arab and African affairs, said there is "no future" in Sudan for either of the two generals fighting its civil war. [25]

They are army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Dagalo, who leads the Rapid Support Forces. [25]

He said the US backs only a handover to civilians, and admitted the ceasefire plan agreed a year ago with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt has produced nothing. [25][26]

Both generals are under US sanctions. [25]

The US has also pushed for a UN arms embargo on the whole country and imposed measures over the army's alleged use of chemical weapons. [26]

A Sudanese analyst told The National the pressure has shifted onto al-Burhan after years of the US trying to balance the two. [26]

The European Parliament held a heated debate on the July crossing into Ceuta, the Spanish city on Morocco's Mediterranean coast. [27]

Centre-right members accused Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of ignoring police and intelligence warnings and going on holiday for 25 days. [27]

Up to 80,000 people crossed, and at least 100 died trying. [28] A resolution goes to a vote next Thursday, and the two big centrist groups are fighting over its wording. [27]

Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is expected to propose tighter asylum rules and a bigger EU border agency in her State of the Union speech. [27]

The argument is no longer about Ceuta; it is about whether the whole bloc copies Denmark's approach or Spain's. [28]

Berlin, a city-state of 3.9 million people, elects its state parliament on 20 September, and the latest infratest dimap poll has the Left Party on 21%, the centre-right CDU on 20% and the far-right AfD on 18%. [29]

The Greens are on 16% and the Social Democrats, who governed Berlin for decades, are on 12%. [29]

Central districts lean Green and Left; the outer districts, where most Berliners live, lean CDU and in places AfD. [29]

The AfD is weaker in Berlin than in Saxony-Anhalt, where it won a state election on 6 September by a margin that makes keeping it out of government almost impossible. [29]

A socialist party topping the poll in the capital is a very different German result from the one two weeks ago.

Riot police used tear gas on about 2,000 shepherds and farmers protesting outside the Romanian government's headquarters on Tuesday. [30]

They are angry that the European Commission extended a ban on live sheep exports to 31 December over outbreaks of small ruminant plague and sheep and goat pox, blaming Romanian authorities for weak prevention. [30]

Crop farmers promised 100 euros a hectare in drought compensation were told they would get 19. [30]

Live sheep exports to the Middle East are the main income for much of Romanian pastoral farming, and the ban has now run most of a year.

The compensation gap is a government promise met at a fifth of its size.

A 24-hour strike at the state-owned nuclear operator EDF, the French gas terminal firm Elengy and Belgium's Fluxys cut French electricity supply by 6.7 gigawatts, about 15% of early-morning demand, though France stayed a net exporter. [31]

The unions are protesting a July recommendation by France's public auditor to cut staff benefits, including cheap electricity and gas for energy workers and pensioners. [31]

The auditor put the cost of that perk to EDF at over 700 million euros in 2024. [31]

It is a warning shot before the French government's budget, which needs savings somewhere. Energy minister Maud Bregeon said she would talk to the unions the same day. [31]

Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022, appeared at the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands on Wednesday for a hearing on whether he is well enough to be tried. [32]

He is charged with crimes against humanity over death squads that killed drug suspects; prosecutors say as many as 30,000 people may have died, while police recorded 6,200. [32]

His lawyers say he has cognitive decline. Judges ruled in January that his health was good enough. [32]

His trial is set for November, and this hearing decides whether it happens at all. He is 81 and has been in custody at The Hague since March 2025. [32]

The Seoul Central District Court ordered North Korea to pay 44.6 billion won, about $32.5m, for blowing up the joint liaison office in the border town of Kaesong in 2020. [33]

It is the first ruling in a lawsuit South Korea's government brought against the North, filed in 2023 by the previous conservative administration. [33]

The court also made North Korea liable for the legal costs. [33] Neither the court nor North Korea's embassy in Beijing commented. [33]

There is no way to collect the money, so the judgment is a record rather than a bill.

South Korea's unification ministry said it respects the ruling and still hopes talks between the two resume. [33]

Japan's Air Self-Defense Force confirmed on Wednesday that its RQ-4B Global Hawk surveillance drone crashed after ground controllers lost contact with it. [34]

Debris photographed floating off Tottori prefecture, on Japan's western coast, was identified as the aircraft. [34] An investigation team has been sent to work out the cause. [34]

The Global Hawk flies very high for very long and is how Japan watches its own coastline and the seas towards North Korea and China.

Replacing one is a years-long purchase, not a reorder.

Japan recorded a trade deficit for the fourth month running in August as its import bill rose 28% from a year earlier to 11.15 trillion yen, about $71.9bn. [35]

Exports rose 19.3% to 10 trillion yen, mostly computer chips and cars. [35] Japan imports almost all its oil, and most of it used to come through the Strait of Hormuz. [35]

Brent crude has gone from the upper $60s a barrel a year ago to above $100, peaking at $118 in April. [35]

The Bank of Japan meets this week and markets expect its rate to go from 1% to 1.25%, which would lift the yen and cut the import bill. [35]

A stronger yen would also hurt exporters like Toyota. [35]

The union representing workers at Micron's Taiwan plants -- the American memory-chip maker's largest manufacturing base -- said on Tuesday it could move towards a strike unless the company agrees to a permanent profit-sharing system giving staff 15% of operating profit. [36]

A one-off cash award did not settle the dispute. [36] No strike has been called and production has not been affected. [36]

Taiwan makes Micron's DRAM and high-bandwidth memory, the chips that go into servers running artificial intelligence.

Memory is already scarce, so a stoppage at one site would be felt worldwide within weeks. [36]

SK Hynix, the South Korean firm that leads the world in high-bandwidth memory chips, is in exploratory talks with Intel about making memory chips on US soil for the first time, three people familiar with the discussions told Reuters. [37]

One option is leasing part of Intel's long-delayed Ohio plant; another is a joint venture with Intel and cloud computing firms wanting to lock in supply. [37]

Opposition from the South Korean government could block it. [37]

Intel has struggled to pay for the Ohio site, and a tenant would help.

The Trump administration has been pressing chipmakers to build inside the US as an AI-driven memory shortage bites. [37]

Chinese investors are rushing into funds that buy foreign shares, especially US ones, after regulators raised the quota on how much money may legally leave the country. [38]

Fund managers have had to cap subscriptions, and the funds trade at high premiums. [38]

The rush follows a crackdown on unofficial routes abroad, such as online brokerages Chinese regulators consider illegal. [38]

Returns on Chinese savings at home are near their lowest, so the demand was already there.

China's government widened the legal door at the same time as it shut the back one. [38]

Guangzhou Automobile Group said it plans to buy part of FAW Group's stake in a car joint venture with an overseas-listed company; Chinese state media reported the venture is FAW Toyota. [39]

That would bring Toyota's two separate Chinese businesses closer together. [39]

Foreign carmakers in China have run through local joint ventures for decades, and the market is shrinking as domestic rivals undercut them. [39]

It is a sign that the joint-venture model foreign carmakers built China on is being consolidated rather than expanded. Analysts expect more of China's crowded car industry to merge. [39]

Malaysia's airport operator has been talking to rival airlines about filling routes as it watches AirAsia's finances, three people told Reuters. [40]

AirAsia had current liabilities of 18.4 billion ringgit, about $4.51bn, at the end of June, and owes the airport operator at least 500 million ringgit in landing and parking fees. [40]

The operator has already extended repayment deadlines. [40] AirAsia says demand is strong and it is raising fresh capital. [40]

AirAsia is the budget airline much of Southeast Asia flies on, so its routes are not easily replaced.

Quiet talks with competitors are what a country does when it is planning for the airline failing.

ADNOC Trading, the arm of the United Arab Emirates' state oil company, agreed to buy 32 million barrels of Iraqi crude in August at discounts of $24.90 to $27 a barrel, and a further 40 million in September. [41]

It has lifted 14 million barrels so far this month. [41]

Iraq's state oil marketer is selling cheap because it struggles to get the oil out, and PetroChina, TotalEnergies, Vitol and Trafigura are buying too. [41]

Iraq is selling at $18 to $27 below the going rate because Hormuz is shut and it cannot ship freely.

Last month Iran let some tankers carrying Iraqi oil through after repeated requests. [41]

Brent crude fell 93 cents to $107.82 a barrel on Wednesday morning and US West Texas Intermediate fell 97 cents to $104.86, after an unexpected rise in US crude inventories. [42]

Traders were still weighing the closure of Saudi Arabia's Yanbu loading port following the pipeline attack. [42]

A price above $100 is what feeds the inflation the budget office has priced into next year. [4]

The fall is small against a rise from the upper $60s a year ago. [35]

The rupee closed at 95.96 to the dollar on Tuesday, its weakest in more than a month and its biggest one-day fall since mid-July, as Brent crude rose more than 2% to $108.20 a barrel. [43]

Likely intervention by India's central bank kept it above 96. [43] Indian stocks and bonds fell too, with traders also betting on a US rate rise this week. [43]

India buys most of its oil abroad and pays for it in dollars, so a dearer barrel and a weaker rupee hit the same bill twice.

Its goods trade deficit for August came in narrower than expected. [43]

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the head of Pakistan's National Disaster Management Authority to use every available resource for people in areas hit by rain, and to coordinate with the provincial disaster agencies. [44]

He asked for link roads and bridges to be kept open and relief goods delivered on time. [44]

The authority's chairman, Lt-Gen Inam Haider Malik, briefed him at a meeting on Tuesday. [44]