World, in brief

Attacks on ships and airports

Iran's forces hit two tankers outside the Strait of Hormuz in two days. [6] A Houthi missile attack left a parked Saudia plane burning at Riyadh's airport, and hundreds of flights were cancelled. [13][14] A Russian bomb hit two buses in Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine, and all its public transport stopped. [15]

Neighbours pulled into wars

Eritrean troops crossed into Tigray, Ethiopia's northern region, and Ethiopian drones struck them. [16] Pakistan's defence minister said nothing in a new pact stops Pakistan joining Saudi Arabia's fight with the Houthis directly. [17] France said it is studying how its forces could guard Yanbu, a Saudi oil port. [18]

Elections setting the timetable

Trump tied the next US strike on Iran to the date of the US midterm vote. [1] Britain dropped a plan to expel Israeli diplomats, saying it would be unwise during Israel's election campaign. [19] Italy's parliament changed how its next election will be counted, before next year's vote. [20]

Rulers squeezing critics

Egypt's prosecutors accused six fact-checkers of terrorism. [21] An Indian youth movement said police detained at least 10,000 of its members before a protest in Delhi. [22] The UN said Afghanistan's rulers arrested at least 52 women over what they wore. [23]

One pressure seen across the day runs through World too.

• War pushing up fuel before winterHigh ↑ · seen in 5 beats→

1. 1Trump says the US will not strike Iran before the 3 November midterms, as Iran's attacks on tankers spread beyond Hormuz
2. 2Ethiopian drones hit Eritrean troops in Tigray
3. 3Russian bomb kills 30 at a bus stop in Kramatorsk
4. 4Houthi missiles shut Riyadh's airport again
5. 5Saudi Arabia's allies argue over joining its war

Donald Trump, the US president, said on Thursday that the US will not attack Iran before the 3 November midterm elections, when Americans vote for Congress. [1][2]

Watch for Iran's formal answer to the US offer on reopening Hormuz, which its foreign minister says could come within days; a deal would show whether ships return before the 3 November vote. [9]

Also seen in Climate, Finance, Money and Food.

Eritrean soldiers crossed into Tigray, Ethiopia's northern region, on Wednesday and reached the area around Adigrat, a town near the border. [16][26]

Ethiopian drones struck them that evening and on Thursday morning, said Acled, a conflict monitor. [16][27] Ethiopia told all foreign forces to leave at once. [26]

Federal forces are also fighting a seven-group rebel coalition led by Tigray's TPLF in the Afar and Amhara regions. [28]

Eritrea did not deny crossing, and called Ethiopia's self-defence claim a cover for war. [26]

The two countries fought a border war from 1998 to 2000 and cut diplomatic ties last week. [27]

Eritrea fears Ethiopia wants to seize a route to the Red Sea through its land, and Ethiopia accuses Eritrea of backing Tigray's rebels. [27]

A fight between the two armies would turn Ethiopia's civil war into a war between two countries. [16][29]

A Russian guided bomb exploded beside two buses full of passengers in Kramatorsk, a front-line city in eastern Ukraine, on Thursday morning. [15][30]

At least 30 people were killed and 18 wounded, and three more died in the nearby village of Bilenke. [30][31]

More Russian drones slowed the rescuers, and all public transport in Kramatorsk and nearby Sloviansk was stopped. [15][32]

Russia is trying to capture both cities, part of a belt of fortified towns in the Donetsk region. [30]

It was one of the deadliest Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians this year. [31]

Russian strikes killed more than 70 people in two days, President Volodymyr Zelensky said; 22 of them died when a missile hit a block of flats in the Chernihiv region. [33]

One missile hits one ship or one plane, but every other ship owner and airline must then decide whether to go, and most stay away.

When a route stays quiet, traffic creeps back, and traders find other ways round: Gulf producers now ship more than twice their pre-war oil from ports outside the strait.

Each of them sees only their own cancelled trip, not the thousands of other people deciding the same thing that day.

The Houthis, an armed group that rules much of Yemen and is allied with Iran, said they fired missiles at Riyadh's King Khalid airport for a third time. [34]

People briefed on it told Reuters a parked Saudia plane caught fire and was badly damaged, with no passengers on board. [13]

More than 275 flights were cancelled on Thursday, the tracker FlightAware said. [14]

Lufthansa stopped flying to Riyadh until 16 October, KLM and Air France until 24 October, and Air India until 10 October. [14][35][36]

Debris from an intercepted missile damaged a kindergarten and a medical centre. [37]

The Houthis had warned airlines 'for the last time' to keep out of Saudi airspace. [37]

The Saudi-led coalition said it destroyed 82 Houthi targets in Yemen and promised the attacks would not go 'unpunished'. [38]

Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia signed the Makkah defence pact on 7 August, which treats an attack on one as an attack on all. [17]

On Thursday Pakistan's defence minister, Khawaja Asif, said nothing in it stops members joining a fight 'directly'. [17]

Turkey's foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said Turkey is working out what it can send, mainly air defence, but will not attack anyone. [39]

Pakistan called a New York Times report that its jets were being used against the Houthis 'fake and fabricated'. [40]

Syria denied reports that Saudi Arabia had asked it for troops. [41]

France, which has about 2,000 troops in the Gulf, said it is studying how to protect Yanbu, Saudi Arabia's Red Sea oil port. [18]

Islamic Relief, a British charity, said Israeli attacks have killed or wounded a Palestinian in Gaza every 90 minutes on average since the ceasefire of 10 October last year. [42][43]

It counted at least 1,454 killed, 320 of them children, and more than 5,000 wounded. [42] Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry gives 1,471 killed, and the UN considers its figures reliable. [42][43]

The ceasefire freed all the remaining hostages and stopped the large-scale bombing, but the peace deal meant to follow it has stalled. [43]

Palestinian officials say more than 20,000 students and school and university staff have been killed since October 2023. [44]

Ukrainian officials are due to meet Trump's envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff in Miami on Friday for two days of talks on ending the war, President Zelensky said. [33]

Ukraine hopes a European team will join them. [33] Ukraine's team includes Zelensky's chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, as well as Rustem Umerov and David Arakhamia. [33]

Zelensky announced the meeting hours after the bus attack in Kramatorsk. [33]

Efforts to end Russia's war look deadlocked, even as both sides step up their attacks. [45] Russia has escalated its air war in recent weeks, while the front line barely moves. [15]

US prosecutors charged Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's former president, and his wife Cilia Flores with conspiracy to commit torture, in court papers unsealed in New York on Thursday. [24][46]

Prosecutors say he authorised torture against named people and ran a system of torture and arbitrary arrest to keep power. [47]

The couple have been jailed in New York since US special forces seized them in Caracas, Venezuela's capital, in January. [46][24]

Their trial is set for June 2027, and a judge refused Flores's request for release. [24]

Until now the case was about drugs and weapons; it now also covers human rights abuses while he ruled. [47] Maduro's lawyer said he denies the new charges. [24]

The UN Security Council voted unanimously on Thursday to extend the arms embargo on Darfur, Sudan's western region, until 11 December. [48][49]

The US wanted it widened to the whole of Sudan, but Russia and China opposed that. [48]

The UN called the vote a short 'technical rollover' to allow more time for talks. [48] Sudan's civil war is now in its fourth year. [49]

The embargo has not stopped weapons reaching Darfur, but it lets UN experts trace shipments and name who broke it. [49]

Protests against foreign migrants turned violent in Durban and in Soweto, part of Johannesburg, on Thursday. [50][51]

Crowds set about two dozen cars on fire, foreign-run shops were looted or forced to close, and gunshots were heard in Soweto. [50][51]

Protesters blocked the Durban refugee centre, where foreigners were queuing to apply for asylum. [52] The anger followed a court order that made South Africa's government start processing asylum claims again. [51][53]

South Africa's government blamed false rumours about the ruling. [50] Its migration ministers say the five refugee offices are overwhelmed, and a panel will review the ruling on 29 October. [53]

Isaias became the first hurricane of this year's Atlantic season on Wednesday night, and had winds of 100mph (160km/h) by Thursday evening. [54]

Millions of people from Louisiana to Florida were under hurricane warnings. [54] Florida, Alabama and Georgia declared emergencies, and some Florida counties ordered evacuations and closed schools. [54]

It is expected to reach land on the northern Gulf coast late Friday or early Saturday. [54]

Forecasters said it should grow stronger before landfall and push a dangerous surge of seawater onto the coast. [54]

Italy's parliament passed Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's new election law by 227 votes to 164 in a secret ballot on Thursday. [20][55]

It replaces a mixed system, where about a third of seats are won seat by seat, with a fully proportional one. [20]

Any coalition that wins at least 42% of the vote gets bonus seats. [55] Meloni says this will bring stable government, and opposition MPs held up signs calling it a 'scam'. [55]

The opposition says the rules are built to keep her coalition in power and will challenge them in the constitutional court. [55] The election is due next year. [20]

The G7's offer to release up to 100 million barrels of oil mostly finishes a 400-million-barrel release agreed in March, says an internal document seen by Euronews. [56]

Only 326 million of the March barrels have been released so far. [56]

On 7 October members of the IEA, the group of oil-using countries that holds emergency stocks, agreed to finish the March release 'as soon as possible'. [56]

This followed a US threat to stop selling diesel abroad unless Europe released more. [56]

So the new pledge adds little oil that had not already been promised. [56] Brent oil traded at $105 a barrel on Thursday. [56]

Europe could be short of 12% to 15% of the gas it needs if a severe cold snap hits this winter, said ENTSOG, the body of Europe's gas pipeline operators, on Thursday. [57]

The report assumes no Russian gas arrives by pipeline, since the EU has mostly stopped buying it. [57]

It warns that losing Europe's biggest undersea gas link and Algeria's pipelines together would be a serious threat. [57]

Stores are lower because filling them over the summer was hard, the report says. [57]

The EU has urged its countries to fill their stores as much as they can in early winter. [57]

The US Labor Department suspended Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe from PERM, a programme firms use to sponsor foreign workers to live in the US for good. [58][59]

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling cited federal investigations into the firms. [59] Vice-President JD Vance accused them of advertising jobs where Americans would not see them, then hiring foreign staff. [59]

No new or pending applications from these firms will be processed. [58]

Many of the firms are Indian or employ thousands of Indian professionals who moved to the US. [59] Microsoft said most of its workers are American. [59]

Smoke from forest fires that have burned in Indonesia for months covered Singapore and Malaysia this week. [60]

All schools in the Malaysian states of Negeri Sembilan, Melaka and Selangor were told to close on Friday, and Johor's schools were shut on Thursday and Friday. [61]

Thick haze stopped planes landing at Senai airport in Johor, and five flights were affected. [62] Indonesia recorded more than 50,000 breathing infections linked to the fires in July and August. [60]

Experts blame a very strong El Nino, a shift in Pacific weather that has dried out parts of Indonesia. [60]

In Johor, three siblings died in a road crash after going to see their closed school. [63]

Ukraine's military said it struck Russia's largest oil refinery, at Omsk in Siberia, about 2,500km from Ukraine. [64]

The refinery is run by Gazprom Neft, a Russian oil company, and had to stop work after an earlier strike in July. [64]

The region's governor said a drone hit an industrial zone but gave no details. [64]

Ukraine is hitting Russian energy and military sites far from the front to raise the cost of the war for Russia. [64]

Avi Gil, a retired general who was Benjamin Netanyahu's military secretary on 7 October 2023, said the prime minister's account of the failures before Hamas's attack does not show 'what really happened'. [65]

Netanyahu gave a 55-page account to Israel's state comptroller, the official who audits government, in February. [65]

Gil confirmed reports that Netanyahu's chief of staff tried to change an official record from that morning. [66]

He said he kept quiet hoping to testify to a state inquiry, which Netanyahu has resisted. [66]

Haaretz had already reported that minutes of many meetings in Netanyahu's account pointed to half-truths and omissions. [65] Israel holds an election on 27 October. [67]

Israel carried out its order to shut Britain's consulate in East Jerusalem, which handles UK ties with Palestinians, but the building stays open as a 'UK Mission'. [68][69]

Twenty diplomats and the consul general will leave, and seven staff may stay. [68]

Israel ordered the closure in September to punish Britain for sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. [68]

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband dropped a plan to expel Israeli diplomats in return. [19]

Miliband said expulsions would be unwise during Israel's election campaign, and some in his government feared tough steps could help Netanyahu. [19]

The consulate, founded in 1838, is separate from the UK embassy in Tel Aviv. [68]

Talks are under way to postpone next month's Palestinian parliamentary election, sources told The National, with a decision due in days. [70]

The last such vote, in 2006, was won by Hamas and led to its split with Fatah, the party that runs the Palestinian Authority. [70]

President Mahmoud Abbas, 90, was elected in 2005 and now rules by decree. [70]

He called off a vote in 2021, saying Israel would not let Palestinians in East Jerusalem take part. [70]

The vote was meant to answer pressure from Palestinians and other governments for reform of the Palestinian Authority. [70]

A top aide to Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, repeatedly blocked, rewrote or delayed embassy reports critical of Israel, a New York Times investigation found. [71]

The reports covered illegal settlement building in the West Bank, settler violence, and the killings of nine Palestinian Americans. [71]

The paper spoke to 15 US officials and nine former diplomats and read dozens of internal papers. [71] It named the aide as David Milstein, 36. [71]

Officials told the paper they feared the information reaching the US government was being bent. [71]

Bassam al-Hassan, who ran Syria's chemical weapons programme under Bashar al-Assad, is living in Lebanon under US protection, a joint BBC and NPR investigation found. [72]

He is wanted for crimes against humanity. [72] The FBI backs his stay because he gave information about Austin Tice, an American journalist kidnapped in Syria in 2012. [72]

Hassan had told US officials that Assad ordered Tice killed, the BBC reported in June 2025. [72]

French high school students blocked schools and marched in cities across France on Thursday, the tenth day of protests over crowded, understaffed schools. [73]

About 25,000 filled Paris's Place de la Bastille, and riot police later fired tear gas and charged the crowd. [73]

Education Minister Edouard Geffray said 3,000 substitute teachers will go to schools with the worst shortages. [74] The movement began on 17 September in the Paris suburbs. [74]

Hard-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon called a new day of protest for 13 October. [74] Marchers also demanded less police violence. [75]

About 20,000 people marched through Madrid on Thursday for Maria del Carmen Abascal, the 87-year-old whose eviction set off protests over Spain's housing crisis. [76]

She died in hospital on Wednesday, two weeks after being carried from her home on a stretcher. [77][76]

An investment firm had bought her flat and tried to raise her rent by 230%. [76]

Thousands also protested outside parliament, where MPs accused each other of using her case for votes. [77]

Her eviction led to emergency rent rules, which right-wing parties voted down, and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez then called an election for 29 November. [76]

Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, said in Beirut that the EU will set up a mission to train and advise Lebanon's army and police. [78]

EU foreign ministers are due to approve it on 12 October. [78] Unifil, the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, ends its mission at the end of the year. [78]

Israel occupies about 65 towns and villages in the south. [78]

Kallas said Lebanon must control all its land so no gap opens when Unifil leaves, but the EU mission will not replace it. [78]

Iraq has refused Syria's request to return about 4,000 Syrian prisoners suspected of belonging to Islamic State, Iraq's national security adviser Qasim al-Aboudi told AP. [79]

They were among more than 5,700 suspects moved from north-east Syria to Iraq after fighting broke out there in January. [79]

Iraq says about 400 were not IS members and can go home, and about 50 already have. [79]

The rest will be tried under Iraqi law if found to have committed crimes in Iraq. [79]

Hundreds of them are believed to be senior IS members, and the US took part in the talks on their fate. [79]

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from the Jerusalem Faction, a hardline group, blocked major roads in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak on Thursday. [67]

They oppose being drafted into the army, which religious students were long excused from. [67]

Police used stun grenades and clubs on them, and other protesters broke into an event of Shas, a religious party, so senior lawmakers had to be led out. [67]

Channel 12 reported Netanyahu tried and failed to get religious parties to call off the protests, less than three weeks before the 27 October election. [67]

The European Commission asked Russia for the third time in a week to share details of a suspected plague case in Siberia. [80]

Its health spokesperson said the EU lacks the information to judge the risk to other countries. [80]

The US and the World Health Organization have made the same call, and Russia says there is no risk of an epidemic. [80]

A committee of all 27 EU countries met on Wednesday to coordinate. [80]

Russia, and the Soviet Union before it, has a record of playing down disasters, from Chernobyl in 1986 on. [81]