A key Saudi Arabian oil pipeline hit in a drone strike by Iraqi militias will take up to five weeks to repair, AP has reported, citing informed officials.

The East-West Pipeline, which runs 1,200 km across the country towards the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea, will remain mostly out of service during the three- to five-week repair period, the agency said in an article on Tuesday.

One official suggested that parts of the infrastructure could function while segments of the pipeline and a major pumping station are being fixed, but couldn’t say how much oil might get through, according to AP.

Oil prices spiked by more than 3% on Monday, with benchmark Brent crude reaching $109 per barrel, following the decision by the Saudi authorities to shut down the pipeline after it was struck by drones in the Riyadh and Medina areas on Thursday.

The Gulf kingdom blamed Iranian-backed militias in Iraq for the attack, with the government in Baghdad confirming that the UAVs came from Iraqi territory and condemning the aggression.

Saudi Arabia, which is the world’s largest supplier of oil, shifted its exports from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea as the Strait of Hormuz remains shut due to the conflict between the US and Iran.

The Houthis further tightened their grip on the Bab al-Mandeb Strait on Monday, capturing the strategic islands of Greater and Lesser Hanish without a fight, AP reported, citing officials from the group and Saudi-backed forces.

The Yemeni group said on the same day that it had fired dozens of missiles and drones at the King Khalid Air Base in the southern Saudi city of Khamis Mushait.

The attack “was accurate and caused heavy damage” to aircraft hangars, radars, landing strips, and ammunition depots at the facility, Houthi military spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree said.

Saudi military spokesperson Major General Turki al-Malki said 13 civilians were wounded during the Houthi raid on Khamis Mushait, but didn’t confirm the attack on the airbase.

Riyadh has asked Britain for military support in stemming the Houthi advance in Yemen and repelling strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

Last week, US President Donald Trump reportedly declined several requests by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to order airstrikes against the Houthis.

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has so far only agreed to send military advisers to Saudi Arabia, the agency said. Burnham is hesitant to provide further assistance due to concerns of it being viewed as him backing Trump’s war on Iran, which is deeply unpopular in Britain, Bloomberg said.

Concerns that artificial intelligence could take over the world and wipe out humanity are a hoax peddled by radical Democrats, US President Donald Trump has said, doubling down on his rejection of warnings from AI giants.

The debate over artificial intelligence was reignited over the weekend when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for a slowdown in the development of AI models so that researchers could assess the risks. His call was backed by Sam Altman of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and Elon Musk, whose company SpaceXAI developed the Grok chatbot.

Trump responded on Monday with a series of posts on Truth Social, arguing that the concerns were being spread by “Radical Left Dumocrats, who never give up, but seldom win.”

Pointing to the technological race with China, Trump hailed AI and data centers as the “Greatest Economic Development Engine in History” and promised that they “will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces” on his watch.

“I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax – That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!” the president wrote. He compared anxiety over AI to allegations that his team colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election and to the Democrat-led effort to remove him from office during his first term.

“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change.’ That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one,” Trump wrote in another post.

The rapid construction of massive AI data centers, particularly in Virginia, Texas and Georgia, has sparked concerns over their enormous electricity and water consumption.

In a post on X on Monday, Altman wrote that calls for “pacing” AI development do not mean stopping it. “Progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be; interventions like safety cases and monitoring have significant costs,” he wrote.

“No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring,” the OpenAI CEO added.

MS NOW reported that Altman had met privately with Trump on the sidelines of a Republican midterm convention on Thursday to discuss the issue.

The US has for the first time acknowledged that it has weapons in space amid ongoing tensions with Russia and China.

US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink revealed the deployment on Monday during the opening of the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor in Maryland.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenge of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said in a keynote address.

“This is why the Space Force now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” he said, without elaborating. “It’s important from a deterrence perspective,” he added.

During a question-and-answer session, Meink declined to go into detail, stressing that the phrasing of his remarks was “very well thought out.”

“It is critically important that we maintain our dominance, not only in the air but in space,” he said, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine.

The Washington Post quoted a US official as saying that the technology mentioned by Meink could include the ability to “take out” an enemy satellite if it were being used to target American troops or a US satellite.

US President Donald Trump established the Space Force in 2019 during his first term in office, describing space as “the world’s newest warfighting domain.” Last year, he unveiled plans for Golden Dome, a multilayered missile-defense system designed to protect the entire United States which includes space-based interceptors.

The project echoes the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed Star Wars, launched by US President Ronald Reagan at the height of the Cold War in 1983. Reagan’s ambitious program was later scaled back and ultimately abandoned without its proposed space-based weapons being deployed.

In March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov condemned what he described as “the militarization of space” and argued that the Golden Dome “poses a significant threat to strategic stability.”

Since the 2000s, the US, China, India and Russia have tested anti-satellite weapons. In November 2021, the Russian military successfully destroyed a decommissioned Soviet-era spy satellite. The Russian Foreign Ministry said at the time that the operation was conducted in strict accordance with international law and was not directed against any particular country.

The US has violated international law by pressuring Austria to prevent Iran’s nuclear chief from attending a UN nuclear watchdog event in Vienna, Tehran has said.

Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), was blocked from participating in an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting this week after the US refused to grant him a sanctions waiver, Iranian media reported.

“Such acts violate the host country’s obligations under the Headquarters Agreement between the IAEA and Austria. That agreement obliged the host government to take all necessary measures to facilitate the entry of representatives of Member States into Austrian territory,” Iran’s mission in Vienna said in a statement on X on Monday.

Denying the Head of Delegation of a Member State access to the highest policy-making organ of the #IAEA adversely affects the normal functioning and legitimacy of its proceedings. Such acts violate the host country’s obligations under the Headquarters Agreement between the IAEA… pic.twitter.com/Tq66M8hCPw

— Iran Mission UN Vienna (@PMIRAN_Vienna) September 14, 2026

Austria submitted a request to the UN Security Council sanctions committee for an exception to the travel ban, but it was denied, Christian Ebner, the country’s envoy to the UN mission in Vienna, said.

Reza Najafi, Iran’s envoy to international organizations in Vienna, argued that the move was “a serious violation” of the country’s rights as an IAEA member. The agency is tasked with monitoring nuclear activities and compliance with non-proliferation obligations.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright defended the restrictions placed on Eslami.

“He’s a sanctioned individual and we don’t want sanctioned individuals evading their sanctions. He asked for a waiver of the sanctions and it was denied,” Wright told reporters in Vienna, according to AFP.

The incident occurred as talks between the US and Iran remain stalled, with the Strait of Hormuz, an important maritime chokepoint, blocked to normal shipping. A 60-day deadline for reviving negotiations over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program expired last month.

The US insists that Iran must completely dismantle its nuclear program, with President Donald Trump saying that Tehran must never acquire nuclear weapons. Iran, which maintains that it enriches uranium only for civilian purposes, has said that its nuclear program is a sovereign right.

IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi said on Monday that the agency was committed to resuming work with Iran. “We extend our hand to Iran once again to work with us to clarify issues related to its nuclear program,” he said at the organization’s general conference in Austria. He added that he remained “stubbornly optimistic” that the issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear program would be resolved.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei accused the IAEA of helping to promote “threat narratives” and provide “a political and legal case” for the US-Israeli war on Iran, which began in late February.

When the BRIC group, as it was known then, first emerged, it was greeted with amusement as another exotic variety of alphabet soup in the age of globalization. As it became a more permanent fixture, it was regarded as a poor man’s version of a global club, like a humble answer to the G7.

More recently, it has come to be feared, not least by US President Donald Trump, as a potential threat to the dominance of the American dollar. In the run-up to the 2026 BRICS summit in New Delhi, the Western media shifted its focus to the divergences within the group, essentially portraying it as something less than the sum of its parts.

However, all these interpretations miss the actual significance of BRICS, which is its role as an early model of the emerging multipolar order.

Over the past five centuries or so, roughly the period of Western global hegemony, the world order has invariably been based on the dominance of a single power, whether Spain, France, Britain or America, or a combination of powers, such as the Concert of Europe or the US-Soviet bipolar system.

Single-power hegemony remains very much alive in the West today, whether one looks at NATO, AUKUS, international financial institutions or Washington-led alliances in Asia and elsewhere. True, the European Union does not exactly fit this model, but it has NATO as its bedrock, while its members maintain strong, and unequal, relations with the United States.

Its members vary enormously in population, territory, economic weight, military strength and technological and scientific capabilities and their histories aren’t as closely intertwined as those of Europe and North America, while their political systems are highly diverse and their domestic and foreign policies often point in different directions.

Most fundamentally, they represent several great civilizations, including Chinese and Confucian, Indian and Hindu, Islamic, Persian and Arab, Latin American, African and Russian. In this sense, they’re anything but like-minded, yet they reflect the diversity of humankind itself.

What BRICS obviously lacks is a leader because China, with its 1.5 billion people, the world’s largest economy in purchasing-power-parity terms and a leading position in advanced technology, isn’t the group’s boss and nor is Russia, the world’s fourth-largest economy by the same measure, and alongside the United States, a nuclear superpower.

Despite what Moscow sees as NATO waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, it hasn’t attempted to turn BRICS into an anti-Western bloc.

India, meanwhile, is the third major economic power in the group and has overtaken China as the world’s most populous country. It still maintains close ties with America and Western Europe while preserving and developing its historical links with Russia, even as it remains wary of China. Iran and the United Arab Emirates, for their part, find themselves on opposite sides of the ongoing war involving Iran, Israel, and the United States, but BRICS isn’t unraveling.

Meanwhile, even as it lashes out against US bases in the region, Iran is reaching out to its Arab neighbors to discuss a regional security framework in the Persian Gulf.

The durability of Russo-Chinese relations since their normalization in 1989 rests not only on a convergence of fundamental interests, but also on Beijing’s and Moscow’s ability to manage their differences carefully on specific issues.

While the political philosophies of BRICS countries differ widely, they adhere to several key principles that make cooperation possible and at the top of the list is sovereignty as we see Russia, China, India, Iran and others not only preach sovereignty but seek to defend and promote it.

Closely linked to sovereignty is equality, and Russia’s Western adversaries have long sought to humiliate Moscow by portraying it as Beijing’s vassal, as if Western Europe’s kowtowing to Washington and Trump were mere politeness. In reality, Sino-Russian political relations are conducted on an equal footing and the same applies to Russia’s relations with its other BRICS partners, from Brazil and Indonesia to Egypt.

There’s no need to make BRICS appear to be something it is not, it’s is not an alliance or an anti-Western coalition, and if anything, its record offers a glimpse of a different kind of world order.

This is no paradise, but It’s an order in which diversity can thrive, sovereignty is treated as sacred, differences can be managed and consensus, rather than diktat, is the guiding principle.

Decision-making is admittedly difficult and conflicts, including violent ones, are by no means excluded, but it offers a much fairer deal than an order in which one nation or group of nations can impose itself on others, lay down rules for everyone except itself, and then judge and punish those it considers offenders.

The credibility of international law hinges on whether it is applied consistently, regardless of a given country’s size and military clout, Hany Soliman, the executive director of the Cairo-based Arab Center for Research and Studies (ACRS), has told RT.

In his interview on Monday, the researcher touched on the relevance of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was created in 2002 under the Rome Statute to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. While 123 countries have ratified the treaty, multiple nations, including Russia, the US, China, India, and Israel, do not recognize the court’s jurisdiction, with critics accusing the ICC of displaying political bias in its decisions.

For the concept of international justice to remain credible, “the same legal and moral standards… [should be applied] to everyone, regardless of a country’s size, military power, or political influence or alliances,” Soliman argued.

The ACRS executive director emphasized that international law should be enforced “in the absence of double standards” and should strive to address the root causes of crises, rather than merely apportioning blame.

Speaking at a BRICS seminar on criminal law cooperation in June, Russian ambassador-at-large Ilya Rogachev accused Western powers of selectively interpreting international law to advance their political objectives and applying double standards when dealing with nations representing the global majority.

Over the course of the summer, several countries, including Venezuela and the African nations of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Chad, announced their withdrawal from the ICC, accusing the Hague-based court of disproportionately targeting African and Latin American countries and serving as an “instrument of neocolonial repression.”

Burundi and the Philippines pulled out of the Rome Statute in 2017 and 2019, respectively, giving similar reasons.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has also pledged to “systematically dismantle the threat posed” by the ICC to US sovereignty.

Israel is another country that has rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction. Nevertheless, in 2024 the court still issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

EU leaders have called for a stronger presence in the Arctic as NATO expands its military activities in the region, citing what they describe as a growing security threat from Russia.

Moscow has repeatedly dismissed such accusations, saying that NATO is undermining traditional regional cooperation and fueling tensions.

At the first ever European Arctic Summit, held in Rovaniemi, Finland, on September 13-14, twelve EU countries urged a “more strategic and proactive role” in the region and called for more resources to be devoted to Arctic activities amid “evolving geopolitical realities.”

“The European Union should reinforce its position in the Arctic, including through enhanced preparedness,” Finland, Denmark, Estonia, France, Greece, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Sweden said in a joint declaration after the meeting.

Of the 12 signatories, only Denmark, Finland, and Sweden are Arctic states. The five Arctic states outside the EU are Russia, the US, Canada, Norway, and Iceland.

Finland and Sweden joined NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively, expanding the US-led military bloc’s presence in the region. Moscow warned at the time that while their accession did not in itself pose a direct threat to Russia, the deployment of NATO military infrastructure on their territory would prompt a response.

Arctic security is European security.
Three EU Member States – Denmark, Finland, Sweden – are Arctic nations.
As we face a new geopolitical reality, now more than ever, we need to build a new joint approach to the Arctic together with our partners. https://t.co/3FBzgfJN7o

— António Costa (@eucopresident) September 14, 2026

Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo on Monday described Russia as “the most significant and long-term threat to Arctic security and stability,” saying the EU should treat the region as a “strategic frontier.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called it a “geopolitical hotspot” and claimed Russia was expanding its military capabilities there.

The Baltic states have been among the EU’s more hawkish members on Russia since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. All three border Russia and have pressed for tougher measures against Moscow and further military buildup.

NATO ramped up its activities in the Far North earlier this year by launching the Arctic Sentry initiative and establishing the multinational Forward Land Forces presence in Finland in June.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said China was also becoming “increasingly more interested” in the Arctic and said it was necessary to “remain vigilant.” Beijing has rejected Western claims that its activities pose a threat, accusing Washington of using China as a pretext for increasing its own military presence in the region.

Moscow has warned that an increasing military buildup is undermining the Arctic’s traditional role as an area of cooperation. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last month that NATO was trying to turn the region into a new front against Russia and its partners.

Lavrov said the risk of incidents was increasing and it could lead to an armed confrontation with “potentially catastrophic consequences.”

Russia has maintained that it does not threaten NATO states and remains open to cooperation in the Arctic. President Vladimir Putin said earlier this year that the region is strategically important to Russia for national security, industry, and transport, particularly as disruptions elsewhere increase the importance of northern shipping routes.

Washington’s Kennedy Center is reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy after ticket sales and fundraising plunged in recent months, the Washington Post said on Monday. The re-inscription of US President Donald Trump’s name on the building is being considered as a possible solution.

After returning to office, Trump overhauled the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – Washington’s flagship national arts venue and a memorial to the assassinated US president. He also appointed himself chairman.

Last December, his name was added to the facade of the building but was met with protests, legal challenges, and a backlash among performers and audiences. The inscription was taken down after a US District Judge ruled in May that only Congress could change the building’s name and ordered the signage removed.

According to documents obtained by the Washington Post, the Kennedy Center now faces “certain fiscal collapse” within weeks. Internal forecasts cited by the outlet showed revenue has fallen far below target, leaving the institution with a multimillion-dollar deficit despite major spending cuts.

Trustees will consider several inscriptions on Tuesday, including one stating that the center’s renovation, restoration, and endowment were overseen by Trump and the “Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

The financial black hole is not the center’s only problem. Management is also urging trustees to close the main building immediately, saying it is unsafe for continued use after a large section of ceiling plaster crashed down inside the Grand Foyer during a storm.

Engineers have also found widespread corrosion in parts of the structure, including in heavy ceiling assemblies hanging above public walkways. The board had already approved a two-year renovation, but officials now say the main venue may need to shut as early as Tuesday.

Trump’s push to put his name on the Kennedy Center comes as part of a broader rebranding campaign that has already included the renaming of a federal peace institute, a prescription-drug website, a visa program, a planned class of US Navy battleships, and a stretch of road near his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Democratic senators have responded with the Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego, or SERVE Act, which if passed would bar federal property from being named after a sitting president.

Ukraine would produce a “less sophisticated version” of Patriot interceptors should the US choose to grant it a license, President Donald Trump has stated.

In recent months, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has repeatedly asked his Western backers for at least 300 additional missiles to sustain Ukrainian air defenses through the coming winter.

However, according to multiple media reports, the US and its allies are facing severe shortages of Patriot interceptors as Washington has used up a significant part of its stocks in the course of its conflict with Iran.

When asked by a reporter on board Air Force One on Sunday whether Ukraine would receive a license for the air defense missiles, Trump said “we’re talking about it,” clarifying that it would be a “less sophisticated version.”

Trump originally floated the possibility during a meeting with Zelensky on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Türkiye in July.

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots… This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough,” the US president told his counterpart at the time.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg noted at the time that even if approval were granted, “a Patriot missile takes years to build, meaning Ukrainian production of these missiles won’t materialize on the near-term timelines they need.”

Other experts have warned that assembly lines for Patriot interceptors in Ukraine would likely become high-priority targets for Russia.

Reuters, citing sources, claimed in July that the missiles would likely be manufactured under US license in Germany or another European country, with the production shifting to Ukraine only after the hostilities are over.

Die Welt subsequently reported that Boeing, which manufactures the seeker warheads used in PAC-3 interceptors, was reluctant to share the technology with third parties.

Amid intensifying Russian airstrikes, Ukraine last month asked the US to provide it with additional ready-made interceptors.

“We want missiles, too,” Trump said, dismissing Zelensky’s plea.

Several other NATO member states that use Patriots, including Romania, the Netherlands, and Poland, have similarly signaled to Ukraine that their capacity to supply more missiles has been exhausted.

Moscow maintains that Western arms deliveries only unnecessarily prolong the conflict without changing its outcome. Russian officials have also warned that by supplying increasingly advanced weapons to Kiev, NATO countries risk being dragged into the hostilities.

Democratic congressional nominee Chris Gallant modeled for a BDSM retailer while serving in the US military, with some photographs depicting him having sex with another man, the New York Post reported on Sunday.

Gallant, an openly gay man who is running in New York’s 1st Congressional District against Republican incumbent Nick LaLota, appeared in photographs for San Francisco-based fetish sex shop Mr. S Leather wearing collars, straps, neoprene, and bondage equipment, the newspaper said.

The images were available on the company’s website between 2011 and 2020, according to the NYP, with some showing Gallant fully nude and engaged in sex with another man. The period overlapped with Gallant’s service in the Army National Guard.

The photos are no longer available on the website, the NYP reported, but Gallant’s attorney Sara Azari confirmed that they are genuine. She added they had been taken during a “private, consensual photo session” with his then-partner, noting that Gallant was friends with the owner of Mr. S Leather and had agreed that selected images could be used in connection with the company’s products.

NY Dem House candidate modeled for XXX-rated BDSM ads while serving in National Guard https://t.co/WL9nGKKAlv pic.twitter.com/FEHrhMS15K

— New York Post (@nypost) September 13, 2026

According to Azari, Gallant later asked the company to remove the photographs as he began considering public office, and Mr. S Leather complied. Some images subsequently appeared on unaffiliated gay pornography sites, which she said fell outside Gallant’s original consent.

The lawyer went on to stress that Gallant “will not allow photographs from a past relationship or employment to be distorted and weaponized for political purposes or used to distract voters from the issues that matter.”

NYP: Democratic Candidate Once Modeled for Fetish Sex Shop

Chris Gallant, the Democratic nominee running against Long Island Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY) was previously involved in a very different kind of campaign: selling toys as a model for a fetish sex shop

“Gallant appeared in… pic.twitter.com/BMb7qbN54N

— Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) September 14, 2026

Gallant, 37, won the Democratic primary in June with about 63% of the vote. His campaign has described him as a helicopter pilot, former FAA air traffic controller, and volunteer firefighter. Gallant says he has been openly gay in the military since shortly after the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 2011.

A similar controversy erupted in Virginia in 2023, when Democratic state House candidate Susanna Gibson was revealed to have livestreamed sex acts with her husband on Chaturbate while soliciting payments from viewers for specific acts. Rival Republicans later mailed voters sealed flyers marked “explicit” and “18+ only,” containing screenshots and quotes from Gibson’s videos, with the Democrat later narrowly losing the race.

US President Donald Trump has claimed to have brokered a deal whereby both Russia and Ukraine will refrain from targeting each other’s diesel-related infrastructure.

Trump, who demanded that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky stop targeting Russia’s diesel production facilities, claimed in a Truth Social media post that the fuel’s price spike was related to the Ukraine conflict and not the Middle East.

“Ukraine has agreed not to hit Russian Energy targets. Russia has agreed to do, likewise!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran.”

The announcement follows Trump’s call on Zelensky on Sunday to stop targeting Russian diesel production, which he blamed for fuel shortages and rising prices worldwide.

Neither Kiev nor Moscow has confirmed the truce. In a video address on Monday night, Zelensky said Ukraine was ready to “take its own de-escalatory steps” if Russia did so first.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week that a halt to strikes on energy sites would only benefit Ukraine, which he accused of “opening a Pandora’s box” by targeting Russian civilian infrastructure.

Ukraine has been targeting oil refineries, storage facilities, and export infrastructure with long-range drone strikes deep in Russia. Kiev claims this campaign undermines Moscow’s military financing and sustainment, while the Kremlin has stressed that the strikes are targeting civilian infrastructure.

Russia has retaliated with massive drone and missile strikes on Ukraine’s military-linked infrastructure and shipping facilities, effectively crippling the country’s main export route through its Black Sea ports. Moscow maintains that it never targets civilians.

Before the US and Israel attacked Iran in February, around a fifth of global energy supplies passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran’s subsequent restrictions on commercial shipping, along with a US naval blockade, have disrupted flows through the key waterway.

The rise in diesel prices could have broader consequences for US consumers because it is widely used in agriculture and freight transport, including trucks and trains that carry food and other goods. Fuel is estimated to account for between 15% and 30% of food costs in the US, according to various estimates.

Sweden’s center-left bloc has increased its lead to three seats over right-wing ruling parties, with 95% of the ballots counted in Sunday’s general election.

The left-leaning opposition, led by the Social Democrats of former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, is ahead 176 to 173 over the center-right coalition, headed by the Moderates of current Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and their far-right partners, the Sweden Democrats, according to preliminary results published by the Swedish Election Authority on Monday.

Holding on to 175 out of 349 spots in the national parliament, the Riksdag, is enough for a majority and the ability to form a government.

This year’s election is the first in Sweden since it abandoned its longstanding policy of neutrality and joined NATO in 2024, citing security concerns due to the Ukraine conflict.

Before the 2022 vote, narrowly won by Kristersson and his allies, Andersson’s Social Democrats were seen as the main obstacle for the country becoming a member of the US-led military bloc.

Kristersson has been a staunch support of Ukraine, with Stockholm providing Kiev with almost $16 billion in military and other forms of assistance during his tenure.

Migrants are playing a crucial role in the 2026 election, with some 17% or 1.34 million eligible Swedish voters being born outside the country.

“If this result remains valid, Sweden will get a new government,” Andersson told her supporters late on Sunday.

Kristersson said he is “going to take it pretty easy” until the final results of the election are announced. The prime minister also didn’t rule out the possibility of trying to lure some of Andersson’s current allies, particularly the Center party, which has 25 seats, to his side to form an alternative coalition. If all of the parties stick to their red lines, “Sweden will not have a government,” he warned.

If the right-wing coalition “no longer has a majority, he will probably have to face the consequences of that,” he insisted.

The final results of the vote are scheduled to be announced on Wednesday, with some 200,000 votes, including those from overseas, yet to be counted. The Swedish parliament is set to gather in late September to elect a new speaker and then the prime minister.

A member of the British Armed Forces has died in Ukraine, the UK Ministry of Defense has announced. In a statement on X, the ministry said that the serviceman was killed in a “road traffic incident” on Saturday.

The unnamed individual’s family has been informed and has requested a grace period before any further details are released, the ministry said.

British news outlets have reported that the death is not believed to have been the result of any hostile actions. It is currently unclear where the individual in question served or what their role was.

The incident marks the second time London has confirmed the death of one of its service members in Ukraine. A UK paratrooper was killed in December in what the British Defense Ministry described as a “tragic accident” during a test flight of a new Ukrainian drone.

Moscow has long rejected London’s portrayal of its role as limited to training and support, accusing Britain of direct involvement in Ukrainian military operations. Russian officials have claimed that UK specialists help Kiev plan attacks, operate sophisticated Western weapons, prepare sabotage missions, and coordinate drone strikes on Russia’s infrastructure.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in August that Britain’s involvement in missile strikes on Russia gave Moscow grounds to regard the UK as a party to the war, “with all ensuing consequences.”

Moscow has warned that British military personnel, equipment and facilities in Ukraine and beyond could be treated as legitimate targets if they are used for strikes on Russia.

A US Embassy staffer suspected of possessing child abuse images was secretly flown out of the UK before British police could question him, according to media reports.

The unnamed American employee, who was assigned to the US Embassy in London, was reportedly taken from his south London home by American officials on August 25 and flown to the United States. British media have described him as having diplomatic immunity, although his precise diplomatic status has not been officially disclosed.

The Sun, which first reported the case, claimed that members of a US team raided the man’s flat, took him to the RAF Fairford airbase and then flew him to the US aboard a cargo plane. Foreign officials have no general powers of arrest in Britain, and no formal extradition proceedings were initiated, according to the newspaper.

The US Embassy confirmed that the authorities were investigating allegations concerning someone assigned to the mission and said he had been reassigned to the US while the inquiry continued.

“The United States government expects all personnel to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, and we take these allegations seriously,” an embassy spokesperson said.

Accounts differ over whether British authorities were informed before the employee was removed. The embassy said it had “quickly informed UK law enforcement and took swift action,” while The Sun reported that the Metropolitan Police and other British authorities learned of the operation only after the man had been flown out of the country.

“We continue to liaise with them regarding this matter,” the force said. British officials are reportedly in contact with the US Embassy as the investigation continues.

“We expect all foreign diplomats in the UK to abide by our laws, in the same way we expect all UK diplomats to do so when posted overseas,” a British government spokesperson said, adding that it would be inappropriate to comment further while the US investigation was ongoing.

Sacoolas had diplomatic immunity at the time and returned to the US shortly after the crash. She later pleaded guilty to causing death by careless driving and received an eight-month suspended prison sentence but did not return to Britain for sentencing.

France has backed down in a diplomatic fight with the US, expressing regret for publicly questioning Washington’s commitment to human rights after the dispute threatened to derail Paris’ choice of ambassador.

The spat began in July, when France’s mission to the UN in Geneva attacked the US for joining Russia, North Korea and several other countries in voting against another term for Volker Turk, the Austrian diplomat who serves as the UN high commissioner for human rights.

“The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore,” the French mission wrote at the time, adding that “the world no longer listens to it.”

Washington responded angrily, with the US delegation demonstratively walking out while France was speaking at a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine, and accusing Paris of “disingenuous grandstanding” and “condescending and disrespectful rhetoric.”

Reuters later reported that the Trump administration was also considering delaying or blocking French President Emmanuel Macron’s nominee for ambassador to Washington.

Two months later, Paris has changed its tune.

“The Permanent Mission of France to the UN in Geneva regrets the 25 July 2026 message posted on X that called into question the US commitment to human rights,” the mission said in a statement published on Friday.

The US State Department welcomed the statement, saying Washington “notes and appreciates” France’s position.

The episode comes after months of worsening relations between Paris and Washington. Macron has repeatedly questioned whether the US remains a reliable ally, warned other countries against becoming Washington’s “vassals,” and opposed the US-led war against Iran.

He has also clashed with the Trump administration over tariffs, NATO, online speech, and American sanctions on European officials, asserting that Washington’s unpredictable policies are forcing other countries to seek greater independence from the US.

Relations became particularly strained in February after Washington accused France of failing to confront “violent radical leftism” following the killing of a right-wing activist. Trump has also repeatedly accused European governments of freeloading on American security while restricting free speech and obstructing his foreign-policy agenda.

Several senior Israeli politicians have lashed out at the filmmakers behind a documentary accusing the IDF of using AI-assisted systems in the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar went so far as to accuse the two Oscar-winning directors of treachery and threatened to have them stripped of Israeli citizenship.

The controversy erupted after the 80-minute-long film NAZA – the name alludes to an Israeli military shorthand for expected “collateral casualties” – received a 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival last week and won the Special Jury Prize.

The film, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is based on the accounts of anonymous Israeli military and intelligence insiders alleging that the IDF heavily relied on AI systems to identify people and homes for attack on a massive scale, often disregarding collateral civilian casualties. Some insiders described the process as “insanely fun” and akin to a “videogame.”

The film also caused a stir among senior Israeli officials. Zohar called the accolade “shocking,” accusing the directors of seeking to “harm their homeland just to get applause from anti-Semites around the world.”

“[This] is inconceivable and constitutes a betrayal of the state… As Minister of Culture, I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators,” he wrote on X on Sunday.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had attacked the documentary even before the award, calling it a “horrific blood libel” and saying it was particularly infuriating that the accusations had come from Israeli filmmakers. He also acknowledged civilian casualties in Gaza, but argued that “there is no magic button that can destroy Hamas, or any terrorist organization hiding behind” ordinary people.

Yesterday, a film accusing Israel of genocide premiered.

It’s a horrific blood libel against our sons and daughters. What makes it especially painful and infuriating is that this lie comes from Israeli filmmakers and is now being spread around the world.

Let’s get the facts…

— Naftali Bennett נפתלי בנט (@naftalibennett) September 11, 2026

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir – widely regarded as one of the most hardline figures of Israel’s right-wing camp – called the directors a “disgrace,” suggesting Hamas would welcome them, while former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman branded the pair “enemies of Israel.”

Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his office commented on the matter.

Despite Zohar’s threat, there is no precedent of Israeli filmmakers being stripped of citizenship for producing a critical documentary, while the minister himself does not have a mandate to take such a measure.

However, Israeli filmmakers have faced other legal consequences in the past over similar work. In 2022, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on screenings of the documentary Jenin, Jenin – a film by Palestinian-Israeli director Mohammad Bakri which portrayed alleged IDF abuses. The court ordered Bakri to pay around $57,000 in damages after he was sued for defamation.

In 2012, Haaretz journalist Uri Blau was sentenced to four months of community service for unauthorized possession of classified IDF documents used in reporting on targeted killings, even though his articles had passed military censorship. Meanwhile, his military source was sentenced to several years in prison.

A NATO fighter jet took flight after a flock of birds was confused with drones, the Lithuanian authorities have reported.

There have been a number of incidents of Ukrainian UAVs crossing the airspace of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia or crashing in those countries as Kiev has intensified its long-range attacks on energy infrastructure in Leningrad Region in northwestern Russia in recent months.

On Sunday, a perceived drone sighting caused the closure of Vilnius International Airport, the country’s National Crisis Management Center said in a statement later that day.

It was reopened within 40 minutes after a NATO jet, which had taken off from Siauliai airbase in the north of the country, found that the cause of the air alert was not a UAV, but a flock of birds, it said.

“On initial radar readings, marks left by birds and drones can be similar,” the statement read.

Flying a Eurofighter Typhoon jet for a single hour reportedly costs around $65,000.

Last month, NATO said that its warplanes shot down a drone over Latvia, claiming that it entered the Baltic nation’s airspace “as a result of Russian electronic warfare activities.”

Russia has accused Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia of playing with fire by allowing their territory to be used for hostile activity. Russian officials have warned that if the Baltic nations knowingly help facilitate Ukrainian drone strikes, Moscow would consider them complicit in the attacks and would have the right to self-defense under the UN Charter.

Earlier this month, the German government claimed it had grounds to believe that Russia was behind an incident in which an explosive-laden UAV was found between Ukrainian Antonov cargo planes at Leipzig/Halle Airport on August 4. Berlin hasn’t provided any proof linking the drone to Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin denied the German accusations, saying that they were being used to distract the public from domestic economic woes.

Moscow has said repeatedly that it harbors no aggressive designs against Europe, adding that a conflict with NATO is only possible if the Western bloc attacks Russia first or if its members deploy their forces to Ukraine.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) is launching its largest internal restructuring in at least a decade to focus on AI, China, and other pressing challenges, the Washington Post has reported, citing current and former officials.

The NSA director, General Joshua M. Rudd, wants five additional organizations to be created within the agency by mid-October, with the goal that they reach full operational capacity in early 2027, the paper reported on Monday. Besides artificial intelligence and countering Beijing, they will deal with cybersecurity, combat support or warfighting, and global intelligence, according to Washington Post sources.

The NSA is believed to be the largest US intelligence agency, reportedly employing some 30,000 people, both military and civilian, and specializing in digital espionage abroad and at home. It found itself in hot water in 2013 after whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of files to the media detailing the agency’s illicit surveillance of American citizens.

Rudd, who also heads the US Cyber Command within the Pentagon, believes that the “aggressive” overhaul is needed for the NSA to better suit its current and future priorities, officials said.

However, the director’s announcement that the heads of the five new departments could be selected from outside the agency is “unnerving NSA insiders,” they noted. It’s unclear if any appointments have been made so far, according to the sources.

The Washington Post noted that the previous major restructuring at the spy-service, known as “NSA 21,” which was initiated in 2016 under then-Director Mike Rogers, has not yet been completed, despite plans to roll it out in two years.

The overhaul comes as Washington increasingly treats competition with China in artificial intelligence as a national security issue. Last week, the NSA, FBI, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency accused six Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek and Alibaba, of conducting “industrial-scale” efforts to extract capabilities from leading US models.

The US agencies acknowledged that the so-called ‘distillation’ technique is widely used in AI development, but claimed the Chinese firms had employed it to close the technology gap with their American competitors, while avoiding billions of dollars in research and computing costs. Beijing rejected the accusations as groundless and accused Washington of seeking a “monopoly of the AI industry,” warning of “resolute countermeasures” if Chinese companies are targeted.

The 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi took place at a moment when the group is clearly outgrowing its original format as a club of several major emerging economies and gradually becoming a platform capable of shaping debates over global trade, international finance and the political architecture of the world order.

The countries gathered around the same table have very different relations with the West, compete with one another in a number of areas and yet increasingly share an interest in expanding their strategic autonomy. For Russia, this is especially important, because BRICS gives Moscow an opportunity to deepen economic ties with the largest non-Western powers, develop settlement mechanisms less vulnerable to sanctions and demonstrate that attempts to politically isolate the country have not kept it from engaging in high-level international diplomacy.

It was against this backdrop that Russian President Vladimir Putin articulated Moscow’s interpretation of the changes now taking place in the global system, saying in New Delhi that the world is undergoing “profound, fundamental shifts” as new centers of economic growth increasingly replace the old ones.

According to the Russian president, BRICS countries have accounted for more than 40 percent of global GDP growth over the past five years, compared with around 29 percent for the G7, a trend Moscow sees as evidence that the redistribution of economic power is already taking place regardless of political declarations. Putin went further by describing BRICS as a “new and sustainable platform for global growth”, while stressing that the rules governing such a system should not be imposed on its participants from outside. For Russia, this principle is central to the entire concept of a multipolar order.

Only a few years ago, discussions about BRICS were often dominated by symbolism and general calls for reform of the global order, whereas the agenda today increasingly revolves around payment systems, national currencies, transport corridors, technology, the New Development Bank and more resilient industrial supply chains. Multipolarity is only strategically meaningful for Moscow when it is supported by practical alternatives in trade, finance, logistics and investment.

The most important bilateral meeting for Vladimir Putin in New Delhi was his discussion with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which covered politics, trade, defense, energy, space cooperation, labor mobility and broader humanitarian ties. The two sides reaffirmed their intention to expand bilateral trade and retained the target of reaching $100 billion in turnover by 2030, while the first INNOPROM India exhibition, which took place in New Delhi right before the BRICS summit, provided an additional signal of the growing industrial dimension of the relationship. Putin and Modi visited the exhibition together, underlining both countries’ interest in moving beyond a model centred primarily on oil, arms and nuclear energy. For Moscow, the strategic objective is increasingly to broaden cooperation into manufacturing, technology, critical minerals and joint industrial projects.

Putin himself placed particular emphasis on this agenda during the BRICS Business Forum, saying that Russia remains open to cooperation with the wider world and is prepared to work with its partners to strengthen energy and food security. He also highlighted the importance of reliable transport routes, including the International North-South Transport Corridor and the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor, which reveals the practical side of Russia’s strategy. Moscow is not interested merely in selling more goods to India, but in building a transport and payment architecture in which Russian-Indian trade is less dependent on shipping routes, banks and intermediaries that may become subject to external political pressure.

The North-South Corridor links Russia with the Caspian region, Iran, the Indian Ocean and the Indian market, making it a physical expression of the multipolarity promoted by BRICS leaders. The more such routes exist alongside traditional Western-dominated channels, the less global trade depends on a limited number of financial and logistical centers. Russia’s growing focus on India is not an attempt to replace one external market with another, but a strategy of diversification in which economic relations are distributed among several major centers of power.

The New Delhi declaration supported the wider use of national currencies in trade and investment, greater interoperability between payment systems and a stronger role for the New Development Bank, while the idea of immediately creating a single BRICS currency remained outside the core agenda. The group’s members have very different economies and monetary systems, but nevertheless share an interest in ensuring that international trade is not dependent on a single financial channel.

For Russia, this issue has become particularly important following the unprecedented expansion of sanctions, because financial autonomy in Moscow is no longer treated as an abstract policy debate but as an element of national economic security.

Even before the summit, the Kremlin said that around 90 percent of Russia’s settlements with BRICS countries were already conducted in national currencies, while Dmitry Peskov stressed that Moscow was not pursuing “de-dollarization” as an end in itself but rather seeking a wider range of acceptable payment mechanisms. The idea is to ensure that access to international trade cannot be cut off by a single political decision.

Putin linked this argument to the wider problem of global economic competition, warning that it was increasingly taking “unseemly forms” through sanctions, restrictions and pressure on infrastructure. At the same time, he argued that economic rules within BRICS should reflect the national interests of its members and be driven by technology, investment and private initiative.

Russian interests shine in sideline diplomacy

The density of Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic contacts in New Delhi was no less revealing, because in addition to the main summit sessions he held a series of bilateral meetings with leaders from Asia and Africa. Following his talks with Modi, Putin met South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and noted that relations between the two countries were “developing successfully,” pointing to sustained political dialogue, interparliamentary ties and cooperation in education. For Moscow, South Africa remains an important partner not only as one of Africa’s leading economies but also as a state through which Russia maintains a voice in the debate about the continent’s role in the emerging international system.

Putin also held separate talks with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, a meeting with clear strategic value as Moscow seeks to expand its presence in Southeast Asia and connect bilateral relations with ASEAN states to the broader BRICS framework. The Russian president also met New Development Bank President Dilma Rousseff, who described Russia’s participation as important for strengthening both the bank itself and the Global South, giving Moscow an opportunity to discuss its position within one of the group’s most important financial institutions. In addition, Putin met Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, further reinforcing Russia’s effort to deepen its political and economic engagement across Africa and illustrating just how geographically broad the BRICS diplomatic network has become.

It is also significant that Putin used the summit to advance the argument for reforming existing international institutions, calling for the broader representation of Asian, African and Latin American countries in the UN Security Council. The Russian president also spoke in favor of increasing the role of developing economies in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, linking institutional reform to changes in the real balance of global economic power. In this area, Russia’s position overlaps directly with India’s long-standing demand that international institutions better reflect the demographic and economic realities of the 21st century.

BRICS is evolving from a slogan into a mechanism

One of the most important political results of the summit was the ability of the expanded BRICS to adopt a joint declaration despite serious internal differences and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. Particularly striking was the fact that countries with sharply different regional interests were nevertheless able to endorse common language calling for restraint, diplomatic solutions and opposition to unilateral coercive measures. The very existence of such a consensus among states with such different foreign-policy orientations suggests that BRICS is beginning to function as a platform where disagreements do not disappear, but no longer automatically preclude cooperation.

Putin described the unipolar model of international relations as something that is gradually passing into history and argued that BRICS is already emerging as one of the centers of global governance. This assessment clearly reflects the Russian view of the international system, but it also rests on an objective foundation, because the expanded grouping represents an enormous share of the world’s population, controls major energy, industrial and raw material resources, and includes several of the fastest-growing large economies. The central question is no longer whether BRICS can symbolically demonstrate a changing global balance, but whether it can translate that weight into durable financial, transport, industrial and technological institutions.

Its idea is not that one center of global power will simply be replaced by another, because such a substitution would hardly make the international system more just. Instead, a new order is gradually emerging, in which states have more than one creditor, more than one payment mechanism, more than one transport corridor and more than one political platform capable of influencing global decisions. In this sense, BRICS is bringing the world closer to a new and fairer international order, not by dismantling existing institutions overnight but by gradually reducing the ability of any single group of countries to claim an exclusive right to set the rules for everyone else.

The New Delhi summit does not complete this transition and does not eliminate the many contradictions within BRICS itself, but it does show that multipolarity is beginning to move beyond political rhetoric.

US President Donald Trump has claimed that Washington could either end its war with Iran or remain in the country and “keep the oil.” Trump has repeatedly threatened to take over the Islamic Republic’s oil infrastructure, prompting Iranian officials to describe the plan as delusional.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Trump said the conflict, which has dragged on for more than six months, could end “right after” the November 3 midterm elections and claimed Iran “wants to make a deal so bad” and was “calling constantly.”

Iran has repeatedly dismissed claims it is seeking negotiations as “fabrications,” adding that Washington is mistaking diplomacy for “dictation.”

The comparison refers to the oil deal Washington struck with Caracas after US forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January.

Trump has repeatedly floated an idea of establishing control over Iran’s oil flows. In late March, when asked whether Washington could take control of Iranian oil, he replied: “It’s an option.” In June, he went further, threatening to seize Kharg Island – a key hub handling about 90% of Tehran’s crude exports – and “assume total control” of Iran’s oil and gas markets.

At the time, Ebrahim Azizi, chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, called Trump “delusional and confused” over the Kharg threat and warned that any move on Iranian territory would bring a response “recorded in history.”

Throughout the conflict, US media reported that Washington considered seizing Kharg Island, although Pentagon officials reportedly viewed the operation as exceptionally risky. Multiple media reports have also suggested that the US military was suffering from depleting stocks of air defense and cruise missiles – a claim Trump has denied.

The comments follow a new escalation in the conflict, with the US military claiming to have destroyed several Iranian oil tankers. Iran, in turn, retaliated by claiming attacks on ten vessels near the Strait of Hormuz, including two US Navy ships and eight tankers.

Former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff Dan Halutz has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of concealing warnings ahead of the October 7 attack and laid ultimate responsibility for the deadly security failure on him.

Halutz was responding to a Haaretz report alleging that UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed had warned Netanyahu about a major operation being planned by Hamas ten days before the incursion. Netanyahu reportedly downplayed the threat and did not alert Israel’s security chiefs.

Netanyahu’s office called the report an “absolute lie,” while the UAE neither confirmed nor denied the allegation.

In an interview aired by Israeli radio station 103FM on Sunday, Halutz said he believed the reported conversation had indeed occurred and claimed there were multiple indications that Netanyahu knew more than he disclosed.

“I don’t know how to get inside the mind of this psychopath. What goes through his head? Only he knows,” he added when asked why Netanyahu had allegedly failed to act.

According to Haaretz, Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet received a separate warning that then-Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was preparing an “earthquake” and a “terrifying operation,” and Netanyahu was briefed on it. During a subsequent security assessment, the agency warned that Israel was “on a collision course” and recommended either significant offensive action or stronger defenses around Gaza and the West Bank, but no decision was made.

“You can constantly level accusations at the supporting actors in the film. But in the end, if the film is bad, you blame the lead actor,” Halutz said.

The Hamas-led assault killed almost 1,200 people in Israel and triggered the war in Gaza, which has resulted in the death of more than 74,000 Palestinians.

The controversy comes ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for October 27. The prime minister, who faces a strong challenge from former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, has described the Haaretz report as “politically motivated” and part of the “left’s election campaign.” 

Netanyahu claimed that a review by the National Security Council and his military secretary found no record of the purported call with the UAE leader, and instructed his lawyers to file a libel lawsuit against Haaretz and the journalists behind the report.

Newly declassified footage has revealed US troops operating deep inside Iran during an April mission to recover two American airmen whose F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down near Isfahan.

More than 90 US service members were ultimately deployed on the ground, while several hundred personnel were in the air and several thousand supported the operation, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper told CBS’ 60 Minutes. He described them as the first acknowledged US “boots on the ground” in Iran in 46 years.

The two-seat F-15E, valued by CBS at about $30 million, was brought down on April 3 by an Iranian shoulder-fired missile costing roughly $100,000 while carrying out a strike on facilities linked to Tehran’s missile and drone programs south of Isfahan. Its crew, identified only by their mission call signs “Alpha” and “Bravo,” ejected and landed about five miles apart.

Alpha, the pilot, was recovered several hours later after the US sent 21 aircraft into Iran. American helicopters came under fire during the extraction, and one was hit by small-arms fire, wounding crew members. An A-10 involved in the search was also hit, forcing its pilot to eject after leaving Iranian airspace.

First on 60 Minutes: Newly declassified video shows the rescue of the U.S. Air Force pilot who was shot down over Iran in April. https://t.co/jGagMqLvCy pic.twitter.com/KxqUITvbAN

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) September 14, 2026

Bravo, the weapons systems officer, remained in Iran for roughly two days after suffering a broken back, arm and shoulder during his ejection. Iranian forces were searching for him as Washington mounted a much larger second extraction effort.

Newly released infrared footage shows US aircraft striking IRGC forces near Bravo’s position before two large special-operations transports landed on a makeshift strip inside Iran. MH-6 “Little Bird” helicopters were then deployed to retrieve him from mountainous terrain.

Newly declassified footage shows the events leading up to the rescue of Bravo, the U.S. Air Force officer who was shot down and survived behind enemy lines in Iran for two days. https://t.co/YUIzeTBpKt pic.twitter.com/0x2zDndgmC

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) September 14, 2026

Another declassified clip shows two US Air Force para-rescuers on the ground inside Iran approaching the wounded Bravo, grabbing him and taking him to an American helicopter.

First on 60 Minutes: Newly declassified video shows service members from U.S. Joint Special Operations Command rescuing Bravo, one of the two U.S. Air Force officers shot down over Iran in April. Bravo was stranded for two days – alone and badly wounded, behind enemy lines.… pic.twitter.com/jAfLa5tfL7

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) September 14, 2026

The operations involved an extraordinary amount of firepower. US forces fired or dropped 339 munitions inside Iran – 123 during the effort to recover Alpha and another 216 during the mission to extract Bravo, according to CBS. The Pentagon ultimately surged more than 150 aircraft for the second rescue alone, including 64 fighters, four bombers, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft and 26 intelligence and electronic-warfare planes.

The newly declassified material provides the clearest official account yet of the scale of Washington’s April incursion, which had drawn comparisons with the failed 1980 Operation Eagle Claw, when a US attempt to rescue US Embassy hostages in Iran ended after mechanical failures and an aircraft collision killed eight US servicemen.

US President Donald Trump has brushed aside mounting warnings from leading artificial intelligence executives that increasingly powerful AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, insisting that Washington’s priority should be defeating China in the technological race.

Speaking to reporters in Ireland on Sunday, Trump acknowledged that some safeguards could be introduced but suggested the dangers were being exaggerated by unspecified “negative forces.”

“We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way… Whoever wins AI wins,” he added, arguing that critics were raising scenarios that “won’t happen.”

’Just slow down yourselves’

Trump’s remarks came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for frontier AI development to be decelerated, warning that increasingly autonomous systems could soon improve their own capabilities, evade existing safeguards and unleash large-scale cyberattacks beyond human control.

White House AI adviser David Sacks responded by accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of being a “duopoly on frontier intelligence” and acting as though “antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel.”

“If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible,” Sacks wrote. “But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission.”

China’s AI surge defies sanctions 

Sacks also questioned whether China would ever agree to a coordinated international slowdown – an issue increasingly central to Washington’s AI debate. 

A US congressional advisory body warned earlier this year that Chinese open-source AI was developing a “self-reinforcing competitive advantage,” with models from companies including Alibaba, Moonshot and MiniMax dominating usage rankings on platforms such as Hugging Face and OpenRouter.

Moonshot AI in July released Kimi K3, the world’s largest 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight system, while Alibaba recently released Qwen3.8-Max with 2.4 trillion parameters. DeepSeek and other Chinese developers have also released increasingly capable models that can be downloaded, modified and deployed independently rather than accessed exclusively through proprietary Western platforms.

Rival AI orders

Addressing the BRICS summit in New Delhi this weekend, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed establishing a BRICS AI open-source community, supporting joint development and deployment of large language models, providing specialized training, and building what he called an “open ecosystem for AI.”

Xi also invited BRICS members to participate in the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), a China-backed body established in Shanghai in July.

The initiative is emerging as a rival to Washington’s Pax Silica framework, which seeks to organize semiconductor, critical-mineral and AI supply chains among what the US describes as “trusted” partners. Washington is reportedly preparing to warn participating states that they may have to choose between the American-led system and Beijing’s WAICO.

Yemen’s Houthis have renewed their drive against Saudi-backed government troops, reporting advances on the cities of Taiz and Marib.

Over the course of the week, the group officially known as the Ansarallah movement seized large swaths of land along the country’s Western coast. The militants captured the strategic Red Sea ports of Mocha and Dhubab, as well as Mayyun (Perim) Island at the mouth of the narrow Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

Over the weekend, the group reported new advances into the city of Tayiz, which is now left in a narrow pocket extending into the Houthi-controlled territory. The group claimed to have seized several villages and key hilltops to the southwest of the city, which is now connected to the rest of government-controlled territory via a single highway.

🇾🇪🗺 Latest Map of the Military Situation in Taiz Front

🟡 Yemeni armed forces, with the support of popular committees, advanced on the western front of Taiz province and reached the important heights of Jabal Jardad and Jabal Habashi, liberating the heights of Al-Da'if, Bani… pic.twitter.com/buQApvrblU

— IWN (@A7_Mirza) September 13, 2026

The group has also reported heavy fighting near the city of Marib, located some 120 km to the east of the capital city of Sanaa, which it controls. Houthi-affiliated media reported government forces partially fleeing the city and the militants gaining ground on its western outskirts.

Simultaneously, the movement reported a sharp uptick in Saudi aerial bombardment, with over 100 strikes carried out over the weekend on the freshly captured areas. The Yemeni government described the bombings as “precision airstrikes on Houthi military vehicles and militants inside the designated Mocha kill box.”

Ansarallah also released a 40-minute documentary on the recent gains made on the western coast, featuring intensive combat in the mountains, ambushes on fleeing enemy troops, and lavish spoils taken by the group. The trophies include assorted armored and unarmored vehicles, ammunition, drones, and at least one US-made counter-artillery radar, the film shows.

The uptick in fighting has displaced more than 82,000 civilians in the areas affected by the hostilities, the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Sunday. Some refugees have braved the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, reaching Djibouti, according to the IOM. 

Yemen has remained locked in a civil war since 2014, which was further aggravated by a Saudi-led intervention in March 2015 intended to prevent a Houthi takeover and the fall of the internationally-recognized government. The group, however, has successfully resisted and remains in control of the northwestern part of the country, which houses the bulk of Yemen’s estimated population of 43 million. 

The Houthi-controlled areas are in a state of humanitarian crisis due to a naval blockade by Riyadh, suffering recurring famine and major disease outbreaks.

Ukrainian migrants must leave Germany, the co-leader of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, has said. She particularly singled out men of fighting age.

Kiev imposed a general mobilization shortly after the escalation of the conflict with Russia in February 2022, barring most able-bodied men aged 22 to 60 from leaving the country. Nevertheless, tens of thousands have crossed the border illegally and reached the European Union. Germany has been the top destination for Ukrainian migrants within the bloc, taking in more than a million people, according to the Federal Statistical Office.

In an interview with Austrian right-wing media outlet AUF1 on Friday, Weidel spoke out against the prospect of naturalizing people “who actually ought to be sent back to their home countries,” including “more than one million Ukrainians here who are receiving the ‘citizen’s benefit’ [welfare payments].”

The AfD co-chair described the burden of continued state aid to Ukrainian migrants as “simply unsustainable,” insisting that they should return to their home country.

“Especially young Ukrainian men of military age – we are talking about hundreds of thousands of them – those young men really ought to go back,” the right-wing politician said.

In June, she similarly said that Kiev should pay reparations to Berlin for the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which the German authorities have blamed on a small group of rogue Ukrainian operatives.

Weidel explained at the time that Germany had “suffered enormous damage… from the loss of cheap Russian fossil fuels” that had been transported via the underwater conduits.

In recent months, opinion polls have consistently indicated that the AfD is Germany’s most popular party, enjoying the support of 28% of respondents.

Last Sunday, the right-wing party won a state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8% of the vote. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) finished second with just 17.2%.

Meanwhile, the incumbent coalition government, which also includes the Social Democratic Party (SPD), has ramped up pressure on Ukrainian draft dodgers.

In July, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt announced that Germany would stop granting automatic temporary protection to Ukrainians fleeing conscription.

Amid mounting casualties, Ukrainian press gangs have increasingly relied on heavy-handed mobilization tactics, colloquially dubbed ‘busification’. Men are being snatched off the streets, from workplaces and residential areas, as evidenced by hundreds of videos circulating online. The campaign has sparked violent clashes with civilians and even riots in some cases.

Moscow has accused the leadership in Kiev and its Western backers of being willing to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian.”

US President Donald Trump has blamed Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky for the ongoing diesel price shock, saying it was a result of Kiev’s attacks on Russian refineries.

The national average price of diesel hit more than $6 per gallon on Friday, up from approximately $5.85 last week. The price has climbed some 60% compared to the same period last year, when diesel fuel cost some $3.71 per gallon. Market experts have mainly linked the hike to the conflict in the Middle East and the reignited hostilities between the US and Iran, which have prompted a renewed rise in crude oil prices.

Trump, however, insisted that this was not the case, telling reporters while on a visit to Ireland that the diesel price spike was actually related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The US president said he had already raised the issue with the Ukrainian leader and told him to stop attacking diesel production in Russia.

“Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel,” Trump asserted, adding that “this isn’t done by the Middle East.”

“There are plenty of other targets. Don’t hit diesel fuel, because that’s hurting the world,” Trump added.

To battle the shortages, the Russian government introduced a temporary ban on exporting gasoline and diesel, as well as other petroleum products. The diesel exports ban was first introduced early this year and extended to gasoline producers in July. The diesel ban is currently in effect until the end of September, yet it is likely to be extended further.

Diesel fuel has been more expensive in the US than gasoline for decades and has previously shown tendencies to rise in price at a faster pace. It is integral to the food supply chain, since it is used to power agricultural machines as well as the cargo trucks and trains which deliver the produce. The cost of fuel accounts for between 15% and 30% of the total cost of food in the US, according to various estimates, and the ongoing hike is bound to affect consumer prices.

International interest in BRICS “continues to grow” as the group’s values and independent approach attract countries around the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday.

Speaking at a BRICS Outreach/BRICS Plus session that concluded its 18th summit in New Delhi, Putin pointed to the broad participation in the meeting as evidence of its growing appeal.

“Our basic values and ideals, such as commitment to an independent and autonomous course and the desire to resolve problems collectively based on international law and the key provisions of the UN Charter, appeal to many around the world,” he said.

BRICS has expanded significantly beyond its original five members – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – in recent years and introduced a partner-country category for states seeking closer cooperation without full membership.

Putin described the organization as “one of the powerful driving forces” behind strengthening “genuine multilateralism” and forming a “new, fairer multipolar world order.”

“The potential for the further development of BRICS is far from exhausted,” he said, pointing to opportunities for new production chains, technologies, services, and markets.

BRICS countries have also developed their own channels for moving goods, services, and capital, allowing financial and commercial operations to be conducted “without paying attention to external pressure,” Putin said.

He urged participants to consider Russian proposals for “building BRICS payment and settlement-depository infrastructure,” as well as establishing a reinsurance mechanism and a grain exchange.

Practical steps have already been taken. On the eve of the summit, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, BRICS Pay and BRICS Pay India agreed to explore integrating the payment platform with India’s existing infrastructure and to prepare pilot cross-border payment projects.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman and xAI owner Elon Musk have backed calls to immediately slow the development of increasingly powerful AI models. Their statements came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could outpace human control and cause catastrophic damage within months.

Four days ago, researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned from Anthropic, accusing both the company and his previous employer, OpenAI, of racing towards self-improving super-intelligence without “acting responsibly.” He also claimed that the technology could “kill us all” by the end of the decade.

In a 3,800-word essay published on his personal website on Saturday, Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela in 2021, outlined “serious” dangers, including loss of control over AI systems, their misuse for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and major economic disruption. He said commercial competition could fuel a “race to the bottom” and exacerbate the threats.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote.

Musk, whose xAI is among the companies competing to develop increasingly advanced models, endorsed the call on X. “Dario is right,” he wrote, adding that he had been “sounding the alarm on AI for a long time.”

Amodei said the technology was advancing “drastically faster,” partly because of its growing ability to help build the next generation of models. Citing an incident in which OpenAI agents reportedly escaped a confined testing environment, he said that within six to 12 months a more capable swarm could “take over the entire internet” and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

He proposed a three-step plan that he said could temper development without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.” The measures include giving outside evaluators deep access to developers’ systems, establishing common industry safety standards, and pursuing international coordination.

Anthropic was the first frontier AI company to deploy its technology on classified US government networks. Its Claude model was integrated into Palantir’s Maven system and reportedly helped generate, locate, and prioritize targets during the US bombing campaign against Iran. It was also reportedly used in the raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Anthropic later refused to lift safeguards against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, arguing that current models remained too unreliable to make life-or-death decisions without human involvement.

The Pentagon insisted that providers must allow their technology to be used for “all lawful purposes” and subsequently designated Anthropic a national security supply chain risk. The company challenged the decision, with a California judge ruling in August that the department’s measures were “illegal and baseless,” although separate proceedings in Washington remain unresolved.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp has opposed calls to pause AI development, arguing that slowing progress would benefit US “adversaries.”

The territorial dispute between Moscow and Kiev remains the main obstacle to ending the Ukraine conflict, Jared Kushner, US special envoy and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has said. His comments came after he and fellow envoy Steve Witkoff traveled to Moscow and Kiev for high-level talks on ending hostilities.

Speaking via video link at the annual YES 2026 conference in Kiev on Friday, Kushner said that Moscow “wants to discuss a way to resolve” the conflict, but “the hardest issue is still territory,” partly because the question is to a degree dictated by a battlefield situation that remains highly dynamic.

“Seeing the advancement in the technology and the way that the battlefield has happened is, I think, beyond the expectation of both sides. And I think one thing I’ve learned in politics is [that] any expert you talk to will give you a ton of ideas, but nobody has any idea what’s actually going to happen,” Kushner said.

Once the territorial question is resolved, Kushner said, that framework could provide “a real mechanism both to enforce it, protect it and oversee it.”

He stressed that much of the rest of a potential deal could fall into place if Moscow and Kiev overcome the territorial dispute. “I think the sides feel good about” the arrangement, he added. “And that’s actually real progress in that regard.”

Kushner and Witkoff travelled to Moscow earlier this month, where they held more than three hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin before heading to Kiev.

Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov described the Moscow meeting as “substantive, constructive and extremely candid,” saying Putin stressed Russia’s battlefield gains and the need to address the conflict’s root causes.

Following the talks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow hopes trilateral negotiations with Washington and Kiev can resume in the “foreseeable future,” with Ushakov naming Abu Dhabi as Russia’s preferred venue.

Moscow has long insisted that a sustainable settlement is possible only if Kiev recognizes the “new territorial realities,” as well as commits to neutrality, demilitarization and denazification. As Russian forces are making progress on the battlefield, Kiev still clings to less than 15% of the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has described BRICS as a key driver of global economic growth as the group’s 18th summit enters its second and final day in New Delhi.

Addressing the BRICS Outreach/BRICS+ session on Sunday, Putin said international interest in the group “continues to grow,” arguing that its commitment to an “independent and autonomous course” and international law appeals to countries around the world. He also said BRICS accounts for 49% of global GDP growth and that its potential for further development is “far from exhausted.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking at the same session, said the trust of Global South nations in BRICS has grown because “their voices are heard, their experiences are respected and solutions are crafted not just for them, but with them.”

Modi also announced that members had reached a consensus on a BRICS Integrated Early Warning System for preventing and responding to infectious diseases, as well as guidelines for integrating early-warning data in disaster management.

On Saturday, BRICS leaders unanimously adopted the New Delhi Declaration, which calls for the reform of global institutions to give emerging markets and developing countries greater representation and condemns unilateral economic measures that violate international law. The document also calls for “maximum restraint” in the Middle East and stresses that dialogue and diplomacy are the only appropriate means of resolving international disputes.

Catch up on our live coverage of the first day here.

This live feed has now ended.

A major fire broke out late on Friday at an ammo dump operated by arms maker EMCO in the Bulgarian province of Gabrovo, prompting allegations that saboteurs could have infiltrated the facility.

Another EMCO facility was hit by a similar blaze in early August; the incident had been attributed to the accidental ignition of a cargo truck. The latest fire broke out in the vicinity of Gorni Vurpishta, and quickly spread from the ammunition depot to two other structures nearby.

Multiple secondary explosions were observed in the area, with the incident triggering a major emergency response and prompting authorities to cordon off the area.

No casualties have been reported in the aftermath of the blaze. Only two security guards were stationed at the facility at the time of the incident, and both managed to flee the site. Footage from the scene shows a large plume of fire and smoke rising above the depot, which continued to burn through the night.

On Saturday, Bulgarian Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev said the authorities are investigating the incident, as well as reviewing “previous cases in which similar fires occurred in the warehouses of this company, as well as at other companies.”

“If it is ultimately concluded that they [arms facilities] have been targeted, this is not an attack on a particular company alone; it is an attack on the national interest,” Dimiev asserted.

EMCO has been actively supplying Kiev with assorted munitions since at least 2014, emerging as one of the key providers of Soviet-caliber ammo to Ukraine amid the ongoing conflict with Russia.

Bulgaria has changed its stance on the Ukraine conflict under Prime Minister Rumen Radev’s government, withdrawing from the so-called “coalition of the willing,” a European group of Kiev’s backers, and announcing that it would no longer send weapons packages.

The US Justice Department has reached a tentative plea agreement with an ex-intelligence officer suspected of faking a classified CIA assignment to steal more than $40 million in government-provided gold bars as “work-related expenses.”

David Rush, who once worked as a senior CIA official with top-secret clearance, was arrested in May after an internal probe discovered he had lied about his education and Navy service. A search of his Virginia home uncovered a trove of 303 one-kilogram gold bars, some $2 million in cash and 35 luxury watches.

Rush has so far been formally charged only with theft of public funds for falsifying pay records to obtain around $77,000 in military-leave compensation. The case has not yet been presented to a federal grand jury.

“The parties need additional time to prepare the paperwork,” Assistant US Attorney Raizza Ty and Rush’s attorney, Jessica Carmichael, wrote in the filing. “A pre-indictment resolution promotes the public interest by conserving government and judicial resources.”

The document did not disclose what charge Rush would plead guilty to or any possible sentencing recommendation. The parties said proceeding with an indictment and trial would require extensive litigation involving classified material. A deal could avert a public trial and keep key details of the case under wraps.

The court filings said that, beginning last November, Rush requested and received “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses,” but official details remain scarce. According to media reports, Rush invented a special-access “continuity of government” operation, ostensibly intended to preserve federal functions during a nuclear war or other catastrophe.

Feinberg has not been accused of wrongdoing, and the Pentagon has denied he endorsed Rush for any position, describing reports of a close professional relationship as “false and embellished.”

Yemen’s Houthis have asked the United States not to intervene in their escalating conflict with Saudi Arabia, US President Donald Trump has said, as Washington seeks to avoid opening another front in the Middle East.

The militant group, officially known as the Ansarallah movement, made major gains along Yemen’s Red Sea coast this week, pushing back Saudi-supported forces and seizing the strategic ports of Mocha and Dhubab, as well as Mayyun (Perim) Island at the entrance to the narrow Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The advance has tightened the group’s grip on one of the world’s most important shipping chokepoints while threatening another crucial route for Saudi oil exports.

“The Houthis called us, and they don’t want to fight with us,” Trump told reporters on Saturday during a visit to Ireland. “They don’t want us to go after them” and “would much prefer not having us involved,” he added.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly called Trump twice on Thursday and urged him to order US strikes against the Houthis to stop their advance. Trump declined the request, according to Axios, which cited US officials as saying Washington has no plans for direct military intervention for now.

The US is nevertheless providing Saudi Arabia with intelligence and targeting data, and roughly 200 American military personnel are providing non-combat support. CENTCOM chief Adm. Brad Cooper also traveled to the kingdom for urgent consultations.

Trump confirmed speaking with the Saudi crown prince but did not disclose details of their conversation. “He’s a good friend of mine,” Trump said. “I can just say everything’s going to work out fine and dandy.”

“We do not target any country except the Saudi enemy,” Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a spokesman for the group, told RT on Thursday. “In fact, we are committed to protecting the freedom of maritime navigation in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea.”

Al-Bukhaiti also warned that Houthi forces are prepared for a broader confrontation if outside powers join Riyadh, saying Yemen was capable of fighting “up to three fronts” – against Saudi Arabia, Yemeni government troops and any foreign country that becomes involved.

The Houthis have launched missile and drone attacks on Saudi energy facilities in recent weeks, while Riyadh has blamed drones launched from Iraq for a separate attack that forced it to shut down its key East-West oil pipeline.

#فيديو

الناطق الرسمي للقوات المسلحة اليمنية : القوات الجوية اليمنية تستهدف عناصر وآليات الميليشيا الحوثية في صندوق القتل .

*المركز الاعلامي للقوات المسلحة* pic.twitter.com/0dL9fVW9he

— المركز الإعلامي للقوات المسلحة اليمنية (@Yem_army_media) September 12, 2026

Fighting has intensified sharply in recent days, with government forces releasing multiple videos of their counterattacks, including what they called “precision airstrikes on Houthi military vehicles and militants inside the designated Mocha kill box.”

#فيديو
القوات المسلحة - مشاهد من استهدافات القوات الجوية لعتاد المليشيا الحوثية الإرهابية في ذو باب وجبهات الساحل الغربي#قناة_اليمن#اليمن pic.twitter.com/4r0NjYs7qT

— قناة اليمن الفضائية | YemenTv (@yementvyem) September 12, 2026

Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree said on Saturday that Saudi aircraft had carried out 129 strikes across seven Yemeni provinces over the previous 48 hours using F-15 and Typhoon jets, warning that the bombardment “will not go unanswered.”

Footage released by Iran-backed Houthi rebels reportedly shows damaged and targeted Saudi-backed military vehicles.

Broadcast by Al-Masirah TV, a Houthi-controlled satellite news network, the video depicted burnt vehicles, the positioning of Houthi combatants, and the Bab… pic.twitter.com/d7ZKtNAD1x

— CGTN Europe (@CGTNEurope) September 12, 2026

The Houthis have also released extensive combat footage of their rapid advance, showing attacks on Saudi-backed forces using conventional weapons, ballistic missiles and drones, as well as abandoned and destroyed vehicles and the bodies of killed troops.

London-based fintech company Revolut disclosed sensitive customer information to scammers after receiving fraudulent requests sent from a “legitimate government agency email domain,” according to media reports on Saturday.

The exposed data included customers’ birth dates, phone numbers, postal and email addresses, as well as copies of passports and driver’s licenses, according to a notification Revolut sent to affected clients and cited by the online newspaper TechCrunch. The compromised data may also have included verification selfies, account statements, and transaction histories, according to the report.

Revolut confirmed the breach to both TechCrunch and Reuters, saying a “limited” number of customers had been affected by a “sophisticated external impersonation scam where an unauthorized third party utilized a legitimate government agency domain email to submit fraudulent requests for information.” 

The incident comes as Revolut has been rapidly expanding internationally. A little over a month ago, it was granted a banking license in France, while the company has also been expanding its presence in markets including India, Mexico, and the UAE. Last week, the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a conditional approval to Revolut, allowing it to set up a bank in the country.

Late last month, police on the British island of Jersey warned Revolut users of an uptick in fraud cases, where the victims had received a telephone call from scammers posing as Revolut support or security teams.

Several countries have also taken issue with the company’s practices in recent years. In April, Italian authorities slapped the online bank with fines totaling €11.5 million ($13.25 million) over alleged unfair commercial practices. Last year, the central bank of Lithuania fined Revolut €3.5 million, accusing it of failing to comply with money laundering prevention regulations.

The Republic of Ireland and the UK’s Northern Ireland will eventually be reunified, US President Donald Trump has predicted.

The Republic of Ireland gained independence from Britain in 1922, while six northeastern counties remained part of the UK as Northern Ireland.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin in Dublin on Saturday, Trump said that he would “love to see [Ireland] unified.”

“I think it would be a great feather… in everybody’s cap if that happened. It’s going to happen eventually. Might as well happen now,” the US president added, suggesting that Martin is the “right man… to get it moving.”

While Trump acknowledged that the “UK will have something to say about it, obviously,” he insisted that a reunified Ireland “would be a great thing.”

Trump also said he and the Irish prime minister are “friends” and described relations between Washington and Dublin as being better than ever before.

Speaking at the US ambassador’s residence later in the day, Trump acknowledged that his remarks could prove controversial, conceding that “it’s one of those questions where no matter what you say, there’s no good answer.”

Earlier this year, Trump similarly suggested that there should be a “merger” between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, citing what he described as a good rapport between Martin and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Emma Little-Pengelly.

The agreement explicitly provides a path to Irish reunification should a majority in Northern Ireland express support for it. This would require the secretary of state for Northern Ireland to call for a referendum on the issue.

In a post on X on Saturday, Gavin Robinson, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, decried Trump’s latest remarks.

“President Trump knows better than most that elections matter… Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because that is the settled democratic will of its people,” the politician wrote.

He expressed confidence that Northern Ireland “will continue to choose the UK and the security it offers.”

Speaking during his first visit to Northern Ireland last month, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham likewise stated that a referendum on Irish reunification was “off the table.”

The second El Alamein International Airshow took place on September 8-10 at El Alamein International Airport in Egypt. The airshow reaffirmed its status as one of the premier military exhibitions in North Africa and the Middle East. Its international prestige was confirmed by the list of participating nations; the organizers succeeded in bringing together fierce rivals – the leading players in the global defense industry from Russia, the US, China, and Europe.

The airshow’s target audience included defense officials, military commanders, government delegations, and the business elite. Overall, it attracted over 250 exhibitors from 50 countries. More than 12,000 industry professionals visited the stands and displays. The roar of jet engines shook the skies over the Mediterranean Sea as aerobatic teams from Egypt, the UAE, and Türkiye, as well as renowned Russian aerobatic pilots, performed complex maneuvers and showcased their skills. Meanwhile, on the ground, multibillion-dollar contracts were signed. 

Why sanctions failed to sideline Russia

Russia’s participation was a distinctive feature and highlight of this year’s airshow. Perhaps the largest and most compelling display was mounted by Russian arms exporter Rosoboronexport (part of the Rostec state corporation). In total, Russia showcased over 500 military-grade products at El Alamein.

Foreign delegations lined up at the Russian exhibit. The reason for this intense interest was pragmatic: Russian weaponry has proven its effectiveness in actual high-tech combat scenarios. The performance characteristics of Western systems are often exaggerated in marketing brochures, while their costs are exorbitantly high; however, Russian equipment has undergone real-world testing against modern reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and air defense systems (including in the zone of Russia’s military operation).

Buyers from around the globe – from the Middle East to Latin America – also appreciate the fact that Moscow offers fair contract terms, free from political blackmail or ideological demands. Historical continuity also plays a major role; many so-called ‘Third World’ countries have traditionally relied on Soviet and Russian weaponry and are familiar with it. Consequently, many of these countries are unwilling to trade reliable Russian equipment for pretty ‘toys’ from other manufacturers.

Combat experience reshapes Russia’s export arsenal

What did Russia showcase at the El Alamein airshow? The star of both the static display and the flying display was the Russian Su-57E fifth-generation multi-role fighter jet. The aerobatic performance by Sukhoi Company chief pilot, Hero of Russia Sergey Bogdan, demonstrated the unsurpassed aerodynamics of modern aviation technology. The aircraft embodies a rich legacy of excellence: Unique aerobatic maneuvers combined with powerful missile and electronic warfare capabilities define the modern Su-57. It carries a new generation of weapon systems – specifically, missiles housed in internal bays. These include air-to-air missiles of various ranges as well as air-to-ground strike systems.

The Yak-130M combat-capable trainer is an upgraded version of the Yak-130 jet trainer. The airshow marked the aircraft’s debut in the Middle East. The Yak-130M is equipped with a full-fledged onboard radar and carries an expanded arsenal of precision-guided weapons, transforming it from a trainer aircraft into a formidable and cost-effective light fighter and attack aircraft. The new model met with immediate success at the airshow; Director General of Rosoboronexport Aleksander Mikheev announced that the first contract for its delivery to a foreign customer was already signed. 

But these were not the only examples of Russia’s success at the airshow. State-of-the-art Russian-designed strike munitions were unveiled publicly for the first time at El Alamein. These include the S-71M Monokhrom missile-drone, the S-71K Kover strike drone, and the S8000 Banderol precision-guided drone-missile. The Monokhrom missile-drone comes in a futuristic design with a trapezoidal fuselage cross-section, a folding swept wing, and a V-shaped all-moving tail unit. It is deployed from the internal weapons bays of Su-57 carrier aircraft. The Kover strike drone is the ‘younger brother’ of the Monokhrom – a simpler drone designed for mass deployment from external hardpoints. Its mission is to operate jointly with manned aircraft, exposing and exhausting enemy air defense systems to clear the path for primary missiles, while simultaneously engaging ground targets.

The Banderol precision-guided drone-missile is a next-generation precision-guided stealth munition that has seen extensive use in recent months in Russia’s military operation zone. This drone-missile can be launched from carrier drones and helicopters without the launch platforms entering the enemy’s air defense zone. The combined use of such munitions ensures 100% penetration of any modern air defense system.

Russian defense enterprises also unveiled several new air defense systems. The TKB-1167 four-barrel anti-drone combat module is capable of automatically detecting and engaging UAVs. It made its international debut at the airshow. Additionally, the cutting-edge ZAK-30 Citadel anti-aircraft artillery system with a 30 mm automatic cannon turret was showcased for the first time. The exhibition also featured the Pantsir-SMD-E air defense system, the Verba man-portable air-defense system (MANPADS), and an airspace monitoring system designed to coordinate the use of these systems. Essentially, the Russian defense industry is displaying military equipment developed and shaped by actual combat experience acquired during the Ukraine conflict. 

The global arms market moves beyond Western dominance

And what did Russia’s competitors bring to the event? The Egyptian airshow vividly demonstrated the nature of the modern multipolar world. While delegations stormed the Russian pavilions, other major powers sought to draw attention to their own displays. 

China mounted an impressive display, underscoring its ambitions on the African continent and its growing military partnership with Cairo. On display were J-16 fighter jets – a mainstay of the PLA Air Force – which are already familiar to Egyptian audiences from recent joint exercises involving Egyptian Rafale fighters. During the flying display, the YY-20 aerial refueling tanker performed a spectacular demonstration of mid-air refueling. 

France and Türkiye demonstrated ambitious aircraft and drone models. As expected, French company Dassault Aviation brought its Rafale fighters. The French strategy was targeted: The exhibition coincided with behind-the-scenes negotiations regarding Egypt’s purchase of an additional batch of 24 such aircraft. Türkiye, represented by the TAI and ASELSAN corporations, played to its strengths by presenting a wide range of strike drones and tactical electronic warfare (EW) systems optimized for the specific conditions of the African theater of operations.

Ultimately, El Alamein International Airshow demonstrated that the rules of the game in the arms market have changed. Attempts to isolate the Russian defense industry have undoubtedly failed. At a time when customers require weapons capable of prevailing in modern high-tech conflicts, Russia’s technological superiority in aviation, air defense, and unmanned systems establishes it as a key and indispensable partner on the international stage.

The Eastern Economic Forum has evolved from a regional investment showcase into one of the key platforms where Russia’s eastward strategy acquires tangible economic substance. Its central idea revolves around the fact that closer relations with Asia require more than diplomacy and trade alone: they need the development of Russia’s own Far East – its ports, industries, transport corridors, cities, and technological base.

The 11th Eastern Economic Forum, held in Vladivostok in early September, centered around the theme of ‘Development for the Benefit of People,’ reflecting the understanding that the region’s future is to be a major center of economic growth, modern industry, and international cooperation, with living standards and human capital the heart of development policy.

The Forum’s program included more than 150 events bringing together government officials, business leaders, academics, and experts, including those from abroad. Representatives of more than 80 countries had expressed interest ahead of the event, and the final figures showed over 9,300 participants from 78 states. These included 18 countries whose governments currently pursue policies regarded by Moscow as unfriendly towards Russia.

This goes to show that political tension between governments does not eliminate commercial or professional interest in working with Russia. The Forum demonstrated that even amid sanctions, geopolitical rivalry, and the fragmentation of global markets, there remains considerable demand for direct engagement with Russian institutions and businesses. This is particularly visible in Asia, which today accounts for a growing share of global manufacturing, trade, investment, and technological development.

Over eleven years, the EEF has moved well beyond the role of a regional investment forum. Advanced development territories, the Free Port of Vladivostok, the Far Eastern mortgage program and urban master plans have all featured prominently on its agenda. The Forum increasingly serves as a mechanism linking domestic development policy with Russia’s broader economic turn towards Asia.

Development of the Russian Far East has become inseparable from the eastward pivot in the country’s foreign policy. The region economically and logistically connects Russia with the Asia-Pacific, and Vladivostok is one of its principal gateways.

This process begun well before the West’s attempts to 'isolate' Russia. According to Vladimir Putin, around 25 trillion rubles (almost $300 billion at today’s exchange rate) in capital investment has been attracted to the Far Eastern regions over the past 11 years, while their combined gross regional product has more than tripled. New port terminals, railway infrastructure, gas-processing and petrochemical facilities, and the Zvezda shipbuilding complex have materially changed the region’s industrial landscape.

Now, the emphasis is shifting from the extraction and transportation of resources towards greater local processing and the creation of higher-value production. Shipbuilding, aircraft manufacturing, robotics, electronics, engineering, digital technologies, and new energy are increasingly being developed alongside traditional resource industries.

This gives Russia’s eastward strategy a dual character. Moscow is strengthening relations with Asian partners while simultaneously using these expanding ties as an incentive to modernize its own eastern territories. The more developed the Far East becomes industrially, technologically, and logistically, the stronger Russia’s position in Asia will be.

Investment deals give weight to strategy

The practical orientation of the Forum was most evident from the agreements concluded during the event. A total of 318 deals worth nearly 7 trillion rubles (about $83 billion) were signed, excluding arrangements whose financial terms remain commercially confidential. While some are framework agreements that will still have to move from declared intent to implementation, their scale and structure reveal the direction of Russia’s Far Eastern development strategy.

Industrial and technological development formed another major component. Plans include a photovoltaic module manufacturing facility in Zabaikalye with estimated investment of around 212 billion rubles ($2.5 billion), a 35-billion-ruble ($415-million) advanced semiconductor production complex in Primorye, and the Muravyov-Amursky Pacific Science and Technology Valley in Vladivostok. Russian and Chinese partners also agreed to develop pilot zones for agricultural cooperation.

Russia is creating value chains, manufacturing capacity, logistics hubs, and technological competencies inside the country. It is also giving foreign partners a direct stake in the development of the Russian Far East. They gain access to resources, infrastructure, transport routes, investment opportunities, and a large market, while Russian regions benefit from capital, industrial projects, technology, and employment.

Working with the world majority

During the plenary session, Vladimir Putin was joined by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Mongolian Prime Minister Nyam-Osoryn Uchral, Myanmar Vice President Nyo Saw, and Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang. Their priorities differed, but all four speakers signaled a clear interest in maintaining and expanding cooperation with Russia.

Prabowo Subianto focused on the fragmentation of the global economy, the politicization of trade, and the need to preserve multiple channels of international cooperation. He argued for building new bridges rather than new dividing lines, particularly in energy, food security, logistics, and technology. Russia is crucial for Indonesia’s strategy of diversification, offering access to energy, agricultural supplies, technology, and the Eurasian market, while Indonesia can serve as an important gateway to ASEAN.

China remains the most important economic partner of the Russian Far East. Ding Xuexiang emphasized closer coordination between the development of the Russian Far East and Northeast China, as well as stronger links between the Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union. The relationship is increasingly moving beyond trade volumes towards infrastructure, investment, industrial cooperation, and cross-border development.

Myanmar, meanwhile, is interested in broadening its relationship with Russia into new technological sectors. Nyo Saw highlighted digital transformation, artificial intelligence, telecommunications, and modern payment systems.

All these different calculations lead to the same conclusion: there is practical value in expanding cooperation with Russia. Russia’s ties with the World Majority are based on not just political dialogue, but on trade, investment, energy, transport, technology, and industrial cooperation. It’s a more solid foundation that fleeting political alignments, and gives the Russian Far East a growing role as one of the country’s principal platforms for engagement with Asia.

A new documentary alleging that Israel relied on powerful AI tools to kill thousands in Gaza has sent shockwaves through the Venice Film Festival, with one of the film’s insiders describing planning airstrikes as “insanely fun.” The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has categorically rejected the film’s portrayal, insisting that the whistleblowers cannot be verified.

The 80-minute-long film NAZA, which premiered on Thursday, is built around testimony from 24 anonymized Israeli military and intelligence insiders. Its title alludes to an Israeli military shorthand for expected “collateral casualties” in an attack.

The film, which was made by two Israeli Oscar-winning filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, received a roughly 25-minute standing ovation – the longest on record at the event. The footage also showed a full audience, with some viewers holding Palestinian flags.

With 25 minutes of Applause, ‘NAZA’ broke the record for the Longest Ovation in the history of the Venice Festival #venicefilmfestival #NoOtherLand #PalestineSolidarity #StandingOvation #venicerecord #longestovation #HistoryMade #yuvalabraham #rachelszor #GazaDocumentary pic.twitter.com/Mr7FORlkt4

— The Cover Story (@Cover_Story63) September 11, 2026

In the film, Israeli insiders claim that the IDF used an AI system known as ‘Lavender’ to identify people for assassination. The filmmakers’ sources also alleged that the tool operated based on thousands of hacked phones, with even a single phrase, “daddy’s home,” picked up on a child’s phone being enough to launch an attack.

Other sources told the tale of brazen disregard for humanitarian laws, and a “general atmosphere” of “hatred” towards Palestinians.
In one of the most chilling revelations, an insider claimed that at one point a strike on a single Hamas member was approved despite an expected toll of 500 civilians.

“It was done on a mass scale, like a factory”, one source said, with others describing the profiling and targeting as “a video game” and “insanely fun.” 

On Friday, the IDF vehemently rejected the allegations, arguing that the identities of the whistleblowers “cannot be verified,” and that it is impossible to establish whether they served in the military at all.

It also stressed that allegations pertained to “national and military strategy that are clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers.” The IDF added that targeting decisions are made “by human personnel only,” and that its operations are only directed at “terrorist organizations.” 

The IDF has itself acknowledged using AI for military purposes, including a system known as ‘The Gospel’, to rapidly produce targeting recommendations.

In April 2024, several media outlets reported, citing Israeli intelligence sources, that Lavender had at one stage marked about 37,000 people as suspected terrorists, with the personnel sometimes spending only seconds reviewing machine-generated recommendations. Some sources quoted by The Guardian also alleged that “during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants.” The IDF has rejected the allegations.

French investigators have identified more “potential recruiters” who may have helped convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein obtain victims in France and elsewhere, a top prosecutor has announced.

Speaking to France Inter on Thursday, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau gave an update on two investigations launched by her office in February after the release of millions of Epstein-related documents in the US. One probe is focused on human trafficking, including alleged recruitment, while the other covers possible money laundering and tax fraud.

Epstein, who had extensive contacts among the international elite, died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. His death was officially ruled a suicide but fueled conspiracy theories that he was murdered by powerful figures to ensure his silence.

According to Beccuau, the case now extends to New York as well as the French Riviera, including Saint-Tropez and Cannes – fashionable playgrounds where Epstein spent considerable time and where French investigators believe parts of his predatory operation functioned.

The prosecutor said that investigators have identified 26 victims, including 13 who had never previously appeared in an Epstein-related case. She added that eight still need to be interviewed, including some who could be living abroad.

France was a significant base for Epstein, where the disgraced financier owned a lavish apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris; former employees told investigators that young women regularly came for massages there. While living in the French capital, Epstein also frequently courted members of the French elite.

The first French investigation, opened after Epstein’s death in 2019, quickly centered on modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, whom investigators suspected of being his principal recruiter in France. Brunel was indicted on charges of raping minors and sexual harassment after being accused of sexual violence by 11 women. In 2022, he died by suicide in a Paris prison.

The probe then focused on Daniel Siad, another modeling scout whom former models accused of targeting young women with promises of fashion careers before sexually exploiting them or introducing them to powerful men.

In July, before the French authorities could gather enough evidence for arrest, Siad was found dead at his home near Paris. Prosecutors did not establish the cause of death but said an autopsy found no signs of recent violence linked to his death while revealing poor health and evidence of an earlier heart attack.

The changing world “cannot be steered by outdated institutions,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Saturday as BRICS leaders adopted the New Delhi Declaration at the annual summit in New Delhi.

The two-day gathering, which runs September 12-13, has brought together leaders from BRICS member and partner countries, with bilateral meetings also taking place on the sidelines.

“Reforms are essential in representation, responsiveness and rule-making,” Modi said, calling for a greater role for the Global South in international decision-making. 

Earlier on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin described BRICS as an emerging center of global governance, saying global politics, security and the economy increasingly depend on the group’s joint decisions.

RT reporters are on the ground in New Delhi covering the 18th BRICS Summit, which runs through Sunday.

This live feed has now ended. Stay tuned for the second day of the BRICS summit on Sunday.

The centerpiece of the BRICS program is underway in New Delhi. The group’s Business Forum was held on September 11, and the Indian capital is hosting the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12-13. This year’s gathering is deeply symbolic. Exactly 20 years ago, in September 2006, the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China met for the first time on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. Back then, the group was known as BRIC, and the idea of close cooperation among the four largest non-Western economies struck many observers as more of a political experiment than a project with a promising future.

From an acronym to a new center of power

It is now clear that this was not a fleeting diplomatic episode, but one of the first institutional responses to the transformation already beginning to reshape the world order. The term ‘BRIC’ was not coined in Moscow. Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill introduced it in 2001.

The roots of this thinking can be traced back to Evgeny Primakov’s vision of a multipolar world and the Russia-India-China triangle he proposed. The idea was not to cobble together an alliance ‘against the West’, but to pursue a far more complex goal: preventing a single center of power from setting the rules for the entire world. At the start of the 21st century, the global economy was changing faster than global politics, and Russia recognized the growing disconnect.

The first full-fledged BRIC summit was held in Ekaterinburg in 2009. South Africa joined the original four in 2011, giving the group the name BRICS that is now familiar around the world. Further expansion followed, and the group now has 11 members. The number of participants, however, is only part of the story. BRICS countries represent around half of the world’s population, 40% of global GDP, and more than a quarter of international trade. Twenty years ago, this configuration would have sounded like an exceedingly bold prediction. Today, it is a reality that cannot be ignored.

Another figure is equally telling: BRICS countries now account for more than half of global economic growth. The question is no longer whether a more multipolar world will emerge. It already has. The real question is whether international institutions can adapt to this shift or will continue to reflect the balance of power that existed in the middle of the last century.

Keeping Asia’s giants at the same table

Against this backdrop, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival in New Delhi carries particular weight. Until recently, his attendance was by no means taken for granted, given the difficult relationship between China and India. Nevertheless, the Chinese leader is visiting India for the first time in seven years, and Beijing and New Delhi are preparing a separate meeting between Xi and Narendra Modi. That fact alone gives this summit exceptional political significance.

Russia’s unique role must also be acknowledged. Moscow maintains strategic ties with both Beijing and New Delhi, serving as an important bridge between Asia’s two largest powers. Russia cannot eliminate the tensions between them, but the forums created with its direct involvement can help keep their rivalry from turning into a permanent rupture. This is one of BRICS’ greatest strengths: It does not erase disagreements, but creates a space where countries can continue talking despite them.

Giving multipolarity a financial foundation

One of the most tangible results of this work is the New Development Bank, established in 2015. Its purpose is to broaden the range of financing options available to developing economies and channel funds into the infrastructure projects they need. To date, the bank has approved 139 projects worth a combined $42.9 billion. These include roads, public transit, energy, water systems, and social and digital infrastructure. Its scale remains modest compared with that of traditional financial institutions, but the emergence of a functioning alternative matters in its own right.

The bank has $100 billion in authorized capital, is expanding its membership, and is working to conduct a greater share of its operations in national currencies. In this way, BRICS is gradually building not an abstract vision of multipolarity, but its material foundation. The emergence of development banks, payment systems, transportation routes, and manufacturing chains of its own says more about the changing world order than political declarations ever could.

This work becomes especially important when sanctions and restrictions on access to financial infrastructure are used as instruments of pressure. BRICS does not seek to replace one currency monopoly with another. The goal is to reduce critical dependence on a single settlement hub. Trade in national currencies and reliable channels for cross-border payments make economies less vulnerable to unilateral decisions.

For Iran, this agenda is no longer theoretical; it is a matter of survival. The Islamic Republic became a full member of BRICS in 2024 and now faces direct US aggression and even more intense economic pressure. Restrictions targeting oil exports, banks, shipping, and foreign trade are intended to cut the country off from normal economic ties. Tehran therefore has every reason to expect that BRICS membership will help it expand trade with the largest non-Western markets, make wider use of national currencies, and reduce its reliance on infrastructure controlled by the US.

Before departing for New Delhi, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called BRICS one of the most important vehicles for countering unilateralism and urged members to make greater use of national currencies. Another practical issue is Iran’s potential accession to the New Development Bank. In August, the governor of Iran’s central bank said the country is preparing to join. Membership could open new avenues for financing energy and transportation projects, as well as the International North-South Transport Corridor.

At the same time, BRICS should not be seen as an emergency bailout fund or a military-political alliance. It cannot automatically lift sanctions or solve Iran’s domestic problems. But it can give Tehran more room to maneuver economically and prevent the policy of isolation from achieving its ultimate goal. For a country being pushed out of international trade, the ability to make payments, attract investment, and gain access to its partners’ markets becomes a source of resilience.

Iran, in turn, matters to BRICS. It is a major economy, a vital energy hub, and a crucial link connecting the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Indian Ocean. Full transportation and economic connectivity across Eurasia is difficult to imagine without Iran. Supporting its legitimate right to development therefore serves not only Tehran’s interests, but the long-term interests of the group as a whole.

The next 20 years begin in New Delhi

The New Delhi summit comes at a moment of profound crisis for the old system of international relations. Sanctions, tariff wars, armed conflicts, and the weaponization of financial infrastructure are eroding trust in the existing rules. BRICS now has an opportunity to prove that multipolarity means more than criticizing the old order – that it can also deliver solutions that work.

Twenty years ago, Russia was one of the leading architects of a political grouping that brought together Brazil, India, and China because it understood that a world in which several billion people are treated merely as objects of decisions made elsewhere cannot be stable. Back then, that was a hypothesis. Today, it is an objective reality. BRICS is no longer predicting the emergence of a new world order; it is giving that order concrete form.

But an anniversary cannot become an excuse for complacency. Economic weight must still be translated into coordinated action. The group must expand financing through the New Development Bank, develop convenient payment mechanisms, increase trade among its members, and defend their legitimate interests. The maturity of BRICS will be judged by these results.

In that sense, New Delhi is more than just the venue for another summit. It is where BRICS is taking stock of its first 20 years and embarking on its next chapter. Russia saw the outlines of the future before most. Now it is up to every member of the group to determine whether that future will be fairer, more stable, and genuinely multipolar.

Hundreds of illegal migrants, including more than 40 “age-disputed” children, who were returned from the UK to France under the ‘one in, one out’ deal have disappeared, The Guardian reports, citing human rights organizations.

The migrant exchange scheme was brokered by Paris and London last summer and hailed as a groundbreaking achievement at the time. Under the deal, the UK can return illegal migrants who cross the Channel to France while accepting asylum seekers with legitimate claims who had not previously attempted to enter Britain illegally.

The scheme has proven to have a very limited impact, with around 1,400 migrants returned since it was signed in September last year, compared with around 32,000 illegal arrivals. Moreover, hundreds of migrants sent back to France under the scheme have disappeared, The Guardian reported, citing figures provided by NGO representatives working on the ground.

The Home Office has strongly denied the allegations, insisting that all those returned were adults. “This is categorically untrue. Nobody has been returned to France, where their age is in dispute,” it told the newspaper.

The fate of the deal remains unclear, with the agreement set to expire in October and neither side confirming or denying whether it will be extended. According to British media reports, Paris wants to scrap the current arrangement and replace it with an EU-wide deal with the UK.

“For our part, we want to move away from this bilateral relationship with the UK. We consider that France should not have to carry it alone and that it would be better to integrate it into an agreement between the EU and UK,” Nunez reportedly told a French parliamentary inquiry.

The CIA has declassified dozens of presidential intelligence briefings revealing that US officials were warned years before the September 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network were considering strikes on American soil involving hijacked or explosive-packed aircraft, while also pursuing biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.

The agency released 71 President’s Daily Brief (PDB) products on Friday to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. The collection, totaling more than 100 pages, is the largest release of CIA presidential intelligence related to the attacks and covers assessments dating from 1998 through the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001.

Among the most striking documents is a September 1998 memorandum on Bin Laden’s intentions. Intelligence indicated that his “preferred option” was to strike the US “on its own soil in Washington,” the CIA wrote, warning that his network “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.”

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11, CIA released 71 President's Daily Briefs to give Americans a glimpse into our most sensitive intelligence from the years before and day after one of our Nation's darkest moments.https://t.co/Z2QIjcuvAj pic.twitter.com/N8ZoZ2OvtZ

— CIA (@CIA) September 11, 2026

Three months later, another briefing warned that Bin Laden and his allies were preparing attacks in the US, including a plan to hijack an American airliner during the holiday season.

The best-known warning came on August 6, 2001, when then-President George W. Bush received a briefing titled ‘Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US’. It said Bin Laden had wanted to attack the US for years, cited suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings, and noted that the FBI was conducting around 70 investigations into possible Al-Qaeda-linked activity in the country.

The 9/11 Commission found that many officials knew “something terrible was planned,” but failures in intelligence sharing, policy, and preparedness prevented the scattered warnings from being turned into action.

Bin Laden rose to prominence during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, when Washington poured billions of dollars into arming anti-Soviet mujahideen through Pakistan. US officials have denied directly funding Bin Laden, but the American-backed war helped create the militant infrastructure and environment from which Al-Qaeda later emerged.

The deadliest terrorist attack in US history, which killed 2,977 people, prompted Washington to launch the War on Terror, invading Afghanistan within weeks and Iraq less than two years later. At home, the PATRIOT Act vastly expanded the government’s powers to spy on its own citizens.

Saudi Arabia has been forced to shut down its strategic East-West oil pipeline after drone attacks damaged pumping facilities along the route, dealing another blow to the kingdom’s ability to export oil amid the US-Iran war.

The Saudi Energy Ministry said on Friday that the pipeline was hit at several locations in the Riyadh and Medina regions the day before, causing “some injuries” and prompting the authorities to halt operations as a “precautionary measure.” Emergency teams are assessing the damage, and Riyadh has not said when pumping will resume.

Two US officials cited by CNN said preliminary analysis indicated that at least two pumping stations along the pipeline were struck by drones. Satellite imagery reportedly shows extensive fire damage at one facility and a smaller fire at another.

CNN reports that pumping stations on Saudi Arabia’s key east-west pipeline were hit on Thursday, with one severely damaged.

The pipeline currently carries 7+ million barrels of crude oil per day bypassing Hormuz. pic.twitter.com/t5fnZMGcgM

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) September 11, 2026

The East-West pipeline carries oil from Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing Eastern Province across the kingdom to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, allowing exports to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. It can transport up to 7 million barrels per day, with around 5 million bpd available for export after supplying Western refineries.

🇸🇦 The scale of the suspected attack on Saudi Arabia’s East–West oil pipeline is visible from space.

Satellite imagery shows a dense smoke plume stretching more than 100 km across the desert, while fire-monitoring data detected several intense heat anomalies along the pipeline… pic.twitter.com/eHFiCCMC3m

— Eye OSINT (@AlexiaNoel94927) September 11, 2026

The route has become particularly important since fighting between the US and Iran severely disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia reportedly rerouted around 5 million barrels per day that would otherwise have been loaded at Persian Gulf terminals through the pipeline to the Red Sea.

🔥Satellite imagery shows further damage at Aramco's Jazan oil facility in southern Saudi Arabia on Sep 9. Fire damage is visible, with two storage tanks destroyed and two more damaged.

Explore and Compare: https://t.co/xJCALwjQKa#SaudiArabia #IranWar #Houthi #MiddleEast pic.twitter.com/Wsa7aqd3yz

— Soar (@SoarAtlas) September 11, 2026

The pipeline shutdown comes as Iranian-aligned Houthi forces in Yemen have pushed back Saudi-backed government forces and seized the Red Sea port of Mocha and Mayun Island at the entrance to another strategic waterway, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

Riyadh said the latest attack on the pipeline did not come from Yemen or Iran, but from Iraqi territory. Saudi Arabia reserved the right to defend its territory and critical infrastructure, but said it would hold off on retaliation at the request of Iraq’s prime minister, giving Baghdad an opportunity to investigate and prevent further attacks.

The developments leave Riyadh squeezed between disruptions at both ends of its export network: Iran has challenged shipping through Hormuz in the east, while the Houthi advance threatens Red Sea traffic in the west. Saudi oil production already plunged to 6.238 million barrels per day in August, its lowest level since 1990, according to Bloomberg.

Oil prices remain above $100 a barrel following the renewed escalation. Brent settled at around $104.61 on Friday, ending the week nearly 9% higher.

Conservative journalist Tucker Carlson has warned that the world is on the brink of a global conflict that could end with the use of nuclear weapons, in an interview with Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi broadcast on RT on Saturday.

Carlson argues that the US is already effectively at war with Russia through Ukraine and warns that further escalation risks a nuclear confrontation.

“The CIA is running the war. The US intelligence services are running the war out of Ukraine against Russia,” he says. “The United States is at war with Russia, and the only kind of conceivable end stage if this continues is a nuclear exchange in which everyone is killed.”

The Ukraine conflict and the US-Israeli war on Iran “have merged into a global war,” he argued, warning that the confrontation now risks the very existence of the US.

Carlson also accuses the Trump administration of abandoning the agenda it campaigned on, saying President Donald Trump and his advisers have “almost systematically betrayed the people who voted for him in 2024.”

He called this “the greatest betrayal that I’m aware of in the history of American politics.”

The interview also covers political censorship in the US, the rise of BRICS, China’s growing global influence, and the changing balance of power internationally.

Watch the full interview with Tucker Carlson on Going Underground

🚨SEASON PREMIERE OF GOING UNDERGROUND⚡️

Tucker Carlson: We Are on the Brink of a WORLD WAR That Ends With The Use of NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Why did Donald Trump start the war on Iran, knowing the disastrous consequences for his Presidency and Gulf allies?

Why is Donald Trump… pic.twitter.com/twh7Wtr9aJ

— Going Underground (@GUnderground_TV) September 11, 2026

Gulf turns into a shooting gallery

The US-Iran conflict moved increasingly onto the water this week, with oil tankers, warships, and drones all getting involved around one of the world’s most important shipping routes.

Washington struck five Iranian crude carriers on Tuesday after previously attacking three other commercial vessels. Tehran retaliated, claiming strikes on eight tankers and two US Navy vessels, while an Iranian attack reportedly damaged several US warplanes at an airbase in Jordan.

Iran also captured an American underwater drone, and two days later, released footage of a US Saildrone surveillance vessel burning in the water.

The escalating hostilities saw Brent crude surge back above $100 a barrel this week, breaking the threshold for the first time in months.

Meanwhile, Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure have added to fears of further disruption as the kingdom’s oil production in August reportedly fell to its lowest level since 1990 amid growing pressure on its usual export routes.

As oil prices continue to destabilize the global energy markets, the fallout is expected to become a major issue in the upcoming US November midterm election. The US president, however, has refused to back down, promising “a lot more” strikes on Iranian tankers.

As for concerned voters, Trump promised to pay every American adult a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans keep control of Congress. He did not explain exactly how the payouts potentially costing well over $1 trillion would be funded.

Speaking of enormous piles of money...

An RT investigation looked at Ukraine’s industrial-scale scam-call business, which is estimated to generate around $1 billion every month and employs some 60,000 people.

The business has also become entangled with allegations that corrupt Ukrainian officials have been taking protection money from the very fraudsters they were supposed to go after, leading to the resignation of Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko.

Separately, the New York Times reported that Ukraine lost around $1.2 billion to fraud, waste, and mismanagement in military procurement in 2024 alone.

While investigators searched for Ukraine’s missing money, Washington continued looking for a peace deal. After Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Moscow and Kiev last weekend, Trump spoke with Putin by phone on Tuesday.

Moscow said it hopes Russia-US-Ukraine talks can resume, while Zelensky floated the UAE, Türkiye, and Switzerland as possible venues.

While Washington has reopened direct channels with Moscow, some European governments that have spent years doing the opposite have increasingly felt the political cost at home.

The clearest example came in Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt last weekend, crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU. Migration was a major issue, but the AfD has also campaigned against sanctions on Russia, Germany’s massive support for Kiev and the abandonment of cheap Russian energy.

Merz said he was “deeply shocked” by the result. He then announced that he would change virtually nothing.

Public dissent grows, governments double down

None of this appears to have slowed Europe’s confrontation with Russia. Moscow this week ordered Germany’s consulate in St. Petersburg and Goethe-Institut cultural centers in Russia to close in retaliation for similar measures taken by Berlin.

Hungary’s new government, which has reversed the comparatively pragmatic Russia policy of former Prime Minister Viktor Orban, expelled ten Russian diplomats. Moscow promised a “harsh and painful” response.

Lithuania, meanwhile, moved closer to scrapping its constitutional ban on hosting weapons of mass destruction, potentially opening the door to nuclear weapons being stationed in the NATO country. Moscow warned that these weapons would become Russian targets.

160km ‘near miss’

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store continued the Western ‘Russian drone’ hysteria by claiming that Vladimir Zelensky’s plane was “almost hit by a drone” while leaving Moldova. Western media duly ran with the story.

However, soon after, Moldova itself pointed out that Zelensky’s aircraft had been sitting safely on the ground, faced “no direct threat,” and that the drone eventually crashed around 160km from Chisinau airport.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov summed up Europe’s current approach rather dramatically, accusing the EU of committing economic harakiri by cutting itself off from Russian energy while its own citizens and industry bear the cost.

The assessment was only further proved accurate after Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, one of Kiev’s strongest supporters, similarly warned on Thursday that the EU can forget about competing with China or the US after cutting itself off from cheap Russian energy.

While much of Europe remains focused on sanctions, diplomatic expulsions and military confrontation, Moscow and New Delhi spent the week discussing planes, trade, energy, space, and investment.

The first INNOPROM. India industrial fair opened in New Delhi, bringing together more than 120 Russian and Indian companies, with agreements covering 105 Russian Il-114-300 regional passenger aircraft and plans for local production of the SJ-100 jet in India.

In other news

AI had another reassuring week as Anthropic revealed five cases in which scientists used its Claude models to help research dangerous pathogens and increase transmission of deadly viruses, which could be used to develop lethal biological weapons.

The report came days after Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger said he believes there is a greater than 10% chance AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade, while his colleague Jacob Coxon quit the company, warning that sufficiently advanced AI could one day help create “extinction-level bioweapons.”

OpenAI, meanwhile, faced new reports that its autonomous agents had once again bypassed restrictions and used outside websites to communicate with one another.

The UK spent tens of thousands of pounds to charter a plane to deport one migrant, according to a report by The Telegraph, citing Home office data.

The report details millions of pounds spent by the British government on charter flights for deportations.

In the year to date, 74 charter flights have cost British taxpayers £13.8 million (around $19 million), including one passenger jet that carried one deportee.

The flight to France on January 7, carrying one deportee, cost taxpayers tens of thousands of pounds, according to the report. It was initially scheduled to carry several migrants but ultimately departed with only one, who reportedly had complex medical needs.

The other passengers were removed from the flight for undisclosed reasons. Sources told the newspaper that officials decided to proceed with the charter because it would otherwise have gone unused.

The 74 flights carried a total of 2,835 people, putting the average cost at around £186,000 per flight and nearly £5,000 per person. The figures do not include removals on regular commercial flights or the cost of security officers accompanying deportees.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp criticized the spending, saying the figures show that the system is “not running efficiently.”

“They should be getting far more migrants deported for this cost,” he said, adding that scheduled flights could be used “for a fraction of this cost.”

Britain has faced sustained illegal migration across the English Channel. Around 33,400 people arrived in small boats in the year ending June 2026, accounting for 88% of detected illegal arrivals, according to government figures. The number was down 23% from 43,309 in the previous 12-month period.

A YouGov poll published in August found that 69% of Britons believed immigration over the previous decade was too high, while 43% said it is mostly bad for the country, up from 33% in 2016.

Migration has remained a major political issue across Europe since the 2015 crisis, when more than 1 million refugees and migrants arrived on the continent, many fleeing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

BRICS leaders are meeting in New Delhi this weekend for the group’s 18th annual summit.

India took over the rotating chair of the group in January and has adopted a different tone. Rhetoric about de-dollarization and overhauling the current financial system has taken a back seat to more practical considerations of economic connectivity.

The summit comes against a mixed backdrop. On the one hand, Chinese President Xi Jinping will be in attendance in what will be his first visit to ⁠India in seven years. This underscores the importance Beijing attaches to BRICS. Also traveling to Delhi is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On the other hand, recently joined BRICS members UAE and Iran have found themselves on opposite sides of the hostilities in the Middle East. A two-day meeting of BRICS foreign ministers in New Delhi in May concluded without a joint statement due to divergent views on the Middle East, and this weekend’s summit will be taking place in the shadow of this tension.

Nevertheless, as trade ties among key BRICS countries keep growing, the methodical work of creating new financial channels and architecture continues apace. BRICS is slowly but surely building an entire institutional ecosystem for trade, investment, and settlement. It is a process often unfolding without loud pronouncements and far from news cycles.

RT takes a look at what’s going on in BRICS these days.

Perhaps the most important tangible proposals on the agenda for this year’s summit are ones to link the payment systems of BRICS countries.

There are two tracks for this.

When implemented, it will make sending money between BRICS countries more like making a domestic electronic payment rather than sending money through a chain of banks and currencies. Currently, for example, if an Indian company buys something from a Brazilian company, the cross-border payment can involve such hassles as correspondent banks and currency conversions – not to mention additional costs.

According to Kremlin aide Kirill Dmitriev, an agreement on BRICS Pay is forthcoming at the summit, where a specific emphasis will be placed on financial questions.

“We are focusing specifically on the financial track. We lead the group responsible for cooperation on financial issues, and payments are a very important part of this,” he said.

This does not necessarily mean, however, that the entire BRICS Pay architecture is about to become operational, but it does mean that the project might receive a large push.

The second track is the proposed linking of members’ central-bank digital currencies (CBDC) for cross-border payments, which India has reportedly included on the agenda of the event.

Linking up the CBDCs of BRICS countries would make the central-bank-issued digital money interoperable across countries. This initiative represents a deeper level in the financial plumbing than BRICS Pay. It would allow cross-border transactions to be settled more directly and with fewer intermediaries and steps. It would also represent an additional settlement route outside the Western-centered architecture.

Importantly, however, this is explicitly not being framed as the creation of a BRICS currency, an initiative that has at times been the subject of speculation. 

The CBDC link-up project remains at the discussion stage.

BRICS trade

Trade within the group continues to grow. Intra-BRICS exports totaled about $1.2 trillion in 2025. India’s trade with the other BRICS members, for example, reached around $416 billion in 2025, growing at nearly 10% annually from 2021–25.

Up for endorsement by leaders at the summit is the BRICS Economic Partnership Strategy 2030, which is an extension of an existing BRICS economic strategy document that, among other things, focuses on trade and investment, the digital economy, and financial cooperation.

It is this type of unglamorous nitty-gritty work that can provide the foundation for BRICS economic infrastructure to eventually match the size and scale of the group’s economies.

Meanwhile, the New Development Bank, established by BRICS in 2015, has now approved roughly $43 billion in lending. While still relatively small in scale, the bank is an example of a BRICS institution that is now up and running.

Energy ties

The crucial energy trade continues to expand as well, notwithstanding Western attempts to suppress Russian exports of oil and gas.

India’s imports of Russian crude reached 2.47 million barrels per day in July 2026, a record 50.8% of India’s total crude imports and 62.4% above the figure from the year prior. For April–July 2026, Russia supplied 43.25% of India’s crude imports, up from 37% a year earlier. Russia remains China’s largest crude oil supplier and the two countries continue to develop energy ties.

Meanwhile, Russia’s recently launched greenfield Vostok Oil, a massive cluster of fields deep in the Arctic, is expected to greatly expand Russia’s energy trade with Asia via the Northern Sea Route, although it will be years before volumes are expected to reach capacity. Nevertheless, this represents a strategically important route that bypasses the fraught Middle East.

Nuclear cooperation has also been a prominent part of the broader BRICS energy and technology agenda. China, India, and Russia are all major powers in civilian nuclear energy and have sought to boost cooperation in recent years.

The bigger context

BRICS has sometimes moved more slowly than proponents would like and has at times been derided, especially in Western policy circles, for a perceived lack of concrete action.

Meanwhile, the crisis in the Middle East, in which BRICS members Iran and the UAE are at odds, is being portrayed as a challenge for unified action.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged that the differences between Iran and the UAE had a “negative impact” on efforts to prepare a joint declaration, although he expressed optimism that diplomatic efforts could bridge the gap.

However, behind the scenes and at a remove from the vicissitudes of politics, work continues to create the infrastructure that will provide nations representing half of the world’s population and 40% of GDP greater economic autonomy. Developing this infrastructure is also at the heart of efforts to create alternatives to Western-dominated systems.

The on-ramp may be long, but once this infrastructure is in place at scale, global financial channels could start looking very different.

This weekend's summit is another step in this direction. 

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has filed a criminal complaint against German Chancellor Friedrich Merz after he claimed that the right-wing party is calling for ethnic cleansing. Merz made the remark in a heated parliamentary debate following the AfD’s resounding victory in the regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt.

The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, according to multiple polls, enjoying the support of 28% of respondents nationally. The right-wing opposition Eurosceptic party advocates tougher immigration controls and is also highly critical of the German government’s support for Ukraine, as well as sanctions against Russia.

In a statement on Thursday, the AfD parliamentary group – the largest opposition faction in the German parliament – accused Merz of defamation that goes beyond constitutionally protected free speech in parliament.

Stephan Brandner, the secretary and legal counsel for the AfD parliamentary group, stated that with “his baseless and repugnant remarks” directed not only at the party itself, but also at millions of German citizens, Merz has “crossed a line… in a way that carries criminal implications.”

The concept of ‘remigration', which has been gaining traction among right-wing circles in Europe in recent years, is usually understood to mean the return of criminal and ‘non-assimilated’ immigrants and, more broadly, residents with a migrant background to their countries of origin.

Merz made the remark days after the AfD won Sunday’s regional elections in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8% of the vote.
The chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party finished a distant second, securing just over 17.2%.

Speaking at a press conference, Merz acknowledged that the Christian Democrats, who had for years dominated Saxony-Anhalt’s political landscape, had suffered the “most serious electoral defeat in decades.”

An INSA poll published by Bild in late August indicated that support for the governing Christian Democratic CDU/CSU bloc had dipped to 20% nationwide, with 78% of respondents dissatisfied with Merz’s coalition government.

Meanwhile, Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, said on Thursday that the party does not “categorically demonize the production of defense equipment, because we will naturally need the appropriate tools for the subsequent remigration and deportation drive.”

“This is also in the interest of internal security, our own stability, and state defense,” the politician stated in response to a journalist’s question that referenced recent media reports of negotiations between Israel’s Elbit Systems and regional authorities. The arms manufacturer is reportedly seeking to set up a plant in the town of Sangerhausen.

In recent months, multiple establishment political figures have called for the opposition AfD to be banned for presumably posing a threat to Germany’s constitutional order and democracy.

In late August, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and Baden-Wurttemberg Governor Cem Ozdemir said that the AfD should be outlawed as it supposedly calls into question the “inviolability of human dignity” enshrined in the German constitution. The politicians who represent the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party, respectively, cited the right-wing party’s tough-on-immigration stance.

The AfD has already been placed under surveillance by the German federal authorities, which classify the party as a ‘suspected right-wing extremist’ entity. In several regions, local AfD chapters have been subjected to even wider monitoring.

A Polish MEP has taken an axe to a memorial honoring Nazi-linked Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries responsible for massacring Polish civilians during World War II.

In a video posted on X on Thursday, Grzegorz Braun can be seen repeatedly striking a stone obelisk in Bialystok, near Poland’s border with Ukraine, which commemorates members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

The UPA was the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a WWII-era ultranationalist movement led by Stepan Bandera which collaborated with Nazi Germany. UPA fighters massacred tens of thousands of ethnic Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, now largely in western Ukraine.

”The UPA monument in the Dolhobyczow municipality in Hrubieszow County is to be dismantled,” he wrote. “The obelisk offending the memory of the victims of the Ukrainian genocide against Poles should be removed... immediately after documenting the crime of Banderism,” Braun added.

Pomnik UPA w gminie Dołhobyczów w powiecie hrubieszowskim do likwidacji❗️

Obelisk obrażający pamięć ofiar ukraińskiego Ludobójstwa na Polakach powinien zostać usunięty profesjonalnymi narzędziami natychmiast po udokumentowaniu przestępstwa banderyzmu!#StopBanderyzacjiPolski… pic.twitter.com/8Q4QZ2z5vJ

— Grzegorz Braun (@GrzegorzBraun_) September 10, 2026

According to Braun, local Poles feared Ukrainian retaliation if they removed the memorial. He said one proposal to dismantle it was met with the response: “We’re afraid they’ll set us on fire.”

The site has repeatedly been vandalized. Unidentified people damaged inscriptions on the obelisk earlier this month, while the Ukrainian Embassy expressed “deep outrage” after another attack in July.

The OUN and UPA massacres remain a major source of tension between Poland and Ukraine. Warsaw recognizes the killings of predominantly Polish civilians in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, and neighboring regions in 1943-1945 as genocide and estimates that up to 100,000 Poles were killed.

The dispute has intensified amid Kiev’s continued honoring of WWII-era Ukrainian nationalists. Vladimir Zelensky took part in the May reburial of OUN leader Andrey Melnik as part of efforts to establish a “Pantheon of outstanding Ukrainians” and later granted a Ukrainian military unit the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA.”

Polish MEP Ewa Zajaczkowska-Hernik has meanwhile called for an end to free weapons deliveries to Ukraine, arguing that Warsaw has provided some $4.6 billion in military aid only to be repaid with a “Banderite pantheon of heroes.” 

”Let’s stop being suckers for Ukraine!” she wrote on X.

Russian President Vladimir Putin weighed in last month, arguing that the neo-Nazi nature of the Ukrainian government has become so visible that even Poland’s strongly anti-Russian authorities can no longer ignore it. Warsaw, he said, faces an “obvious demand” from its population to confront the issue.

An August IBRiS survey separately found that 67% of Poles support deporting unemployed Ukrainian men of military age.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Americans watched in horror as hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. Less than a month later, the US went to war in Afghanistan. Two years after that, it invaded Iraq.

What began as an attack by Al-Qaeda would come to reshape US foreign policy, the Middle East, and the way Islam was discussed around the world.

A quarter of a century later, September 11 still casts a long shadow over American public life. Al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the attacks has long been established, but the edges of the story remain blurred. Documents remained classified for years and only emerged piece by piece; lawsuits dragged on; questions lingered over who might have known more, who might have helped, and how far the web surrounding the hijackers actually extended. In the gaps between what was proven, what remained secret, and what was merely suspected, conspiracy theories flourished – but so did genuine political and legal questions that America has never quite managed to put to rest.

Under former President Joe Biden, the issue returned to public attention when his administration ordered a new review and declassification of government records related to 9/11, following sustained pressure from victims’ families. The Saudi question also became entangled with a broader political reassessment of Washington’s relationship with Riyadh following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In that sense, September 11 left behind more than a settled account of a terrorist attack. It left a long political shadow – one that continued to affect how Americans view particular Arab states, their governments, and eventually, the Muslim world.

The architecture of suspicion

The more immediate consequence of September 11, however, was broader than the hunt for those responsible. The attacks changed the conceptual framework through which the US understood Islam itself.

After 9/11, the country needed explanations: Why did it happen, what produced Islamist violence, and how could another attack be prevented? The American system responded in a characteristically American way: It went looking for expertise. Government agencies poured money into universities, professional associations, and think tanks, demanding explanations – and quickly.

But there was an almost paradoxical mismatch between the question and some of the intellectual tools available to answer it. Many of the scholars being asked to make sense of Islam, political Islam, and jihadist violence built their expertise studying religion in a different context: Christianity in the US, including Christian fundamentalism and its relationship with political extremism.

To Grigory Lukyanov, a research fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and deputy dean at Russia’s State Academic University for the Humanities, the episode illustrates something larger about the American response to 9/11: Confronted with an unfamiliar threat and under enormous pressure to produce answers quickly, institutions reached for intellectual tools they already possessed.

Islam increasingly became something to be categorized in security terms. 

A movement classified as ‘moderate’ might be treated as a potential partner; one categorized as ‘radical’ could become a target of surveillance, sanctions, or counterterrorism operations, but the consequences quickly moved beyond policy and into everyday life. In September 2001, 28% of Americans said they had become more suspicious of people of Middle Eastern descent; in March 2002, 25% of Americans said Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence (now, 25 years later, it’s 51%).

For Lukyanov, the resulting distortions were almost built into the speed and structure of the response. “It is difficult to search for alternatives in counterfactual history,” he said. “The attack had happened. What could the United States do – simply not conduct a War on Terror? Retreat into something like the Monroe Doctrine, recoil from what had happened and accept defeat? That was almost impossible to imagine.”

The US of 2001 was at the height of its post-Cold War power, the Russian expert said. The Soviet Union disappeared a decade earlier; China had not yet emerged as a peer economic competitor; Washington possessed unmatched military, financial, and political reach. September 11 was therefore interpreted not only as a terrorist atrocity, but as a challenge to American global leadership.

“Not responding was impossible,” Lukyanov said. “The question is that the response was built on the experience, analytical frameworks, decision-making patterns and limitations that American political elites had at that moment.”

America’s road to endless war

If the securitization of Islam was one consequence of September 11, the most visible was measured in soldiers, bases, and wars. Yet here as well, 9/11 was less a beginning than an acceleration.

The US was hardly a newcomer to the Middle East in 2001. Its involvement expanded dramatically after the Cold War and the 1990-91 Gulf War. The US had troops and military facilities across the region, protected the Gulf monarchies, enforced no-fly zones over Iraq, supported Israel, and remained indispensable to Arab-Israeli diplomacy. By the end of the 1990s, American primacy in the region was difficult to contest.

“The United States began sinking into the Middle Eastern swamp long before September 11,” Lukyanov said. “There were essentially no other external players, and almost no major conflict or problem in the region could be resolved without the participation of Washington.”

September 11 was therefore not the moment America entered the Middle East. It was, in Lukyanov’s words, a crescendo – the moment an already extensive political and military commitment became something larger and far more difficult to control.

Five years later, Taliban fighters patrol the capital in American-supplied Humvees, carrying American weapons and wearing American tactical gear. Around $7 billion worth of US-funded military equipment remained in Afghanistan after the collapse of the forces the US spent two decades building.

Destroying one enemy, creating another

Then came Iraq.

Unlike Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion was not presented as war against the organization that carried out the September 11 attacks. The administration of George W. Bush argued that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (which were never found) and presented Iraq as part of a broader post-9/11 security threat. But by then, the invasion had already removed the Iraqi state’s leadership, dissolved much of its coercive apparatus, and opened a political vacuum at the center of the Arab world.

One consequence of the US invasion of Iraq can still be felt today, Lukyanov argues, pointing to the ongoing exchange of strikes between Iran and US forces across the region.

“It was the American invasion of Iraq, prompted by the 9/11 policies, that created the conditions for a geopolitical conflict in that country, escalating the geopolitical standoff between the United States and Iran,” Lukyanov adds. “It was precisely because of this that the United States significantly increased its support for Israel and its policies.”

Hussein’s fall destroyed a regime that brutally dominated Iraq for decades, but it also removed one of the principal Arab counterweights to Iran. Iraq’s long-suppressed Shia majority acquired unprecedented political power, while many Sunnis who occupied privileged positions under the old order suddenly found themselves marginalized.

The friends America abandoned

The War on Terror did not only transform America’s enemies, it also transformed its friendships.

Across the Arab world, authoritarian governments quickly discovered the political value of becoming indispensable to America’s new struggle. Tunisia, Sudan, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, and several Gulf monarchies expanded counterterrorism cooperation with the US, while governments increasingly presented domestic repression as part of the same fight against extremism. The distinction between jihadists and non-violent Islamist opponents could become dangerously elastic. Organizations that threatened the regime politically could be folded into a much broader security problem.

For aging authoritarian systems, the new order offered an opportunity. Lukyanov argues that some regimes came to believe that cooperation against a common enemy would buy them a kind of political absolution. “The War on Terror gave them the illusion that, by acting against a common enemy together with the United States, they would receive forgiveness for everything that had happened in the past.”

Few countries tested that proposition as dramatically as Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi spent decades as an adversary of Washington. But he was also an enemy of the jihadists seeking to overthrow him. After 9/11, this suddenly gave Tripoli and Washington something to talk about. Libya shared intelligence on Al-Qaeda and other Islamist militants with Western services; in 2003, Gaddafi renounced terrorism and agreed to dismantle his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Sanctions were progressively lifted, diplomatic relations restored, and in 2006, the US removed Libya from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.

But there was a catch. Cooperation abroad did not require meaningful liberalization at home. Libya remained brutally authoritarian even as relations with Washington improved; elsewhere, the counterterrorism imperative similarly gave security states additional room to operate. In Egypt, emergency laws allowed thousands to be detained without fair trials, while Washington tolerated serious abuses by governments it relied upon for counterterrorism cooperation. 

Then, a decade after September 11, the bargain began to come apart when uprisings began in Tunisia in late 2010, and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak resigned after nearly 30 years in power. And in Libya, the reversal was even more extraordinary: Gaddafi – the former enemy who dismantled his weapons programs, shared intelligence on jihadists, and rebuilt relations with the West – faced an uprising of his own. NATO intervened against his forces, and in October 2011, Gaddafi was killed.

The political vacuum produced another irony, Lukyanov said. For decades, some Arab governments portrayed Islamism as one of the principal dangers from which their rule protected both their own societies and the West. Once several of these governments fell, however, Islamist movements proved to be among the best-organized political forces left standing. Ennahda won Tunisia’s first post-revolutionary election; in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the dominant electoral force and its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the presidency. “In the end, in both Egypt and Tunisia, for example, movements that had provided Al-Qaeda with a social and political support base came to power,” Lukyanov said.

In the places where revolutions did not produce functioning political systems, the circle became darker still. Libya descended into fragmentation and civil war; Yemen collapsed into a regional conflict; Syria became the battlefield in which local rebellion, state repression, regional competition, and transnational jihadism converged. Groups linked to Al-Qaeda, and eventually ISIS, found new territory in the wreckage.

When the War on Terror came home

Six days after the attacks, Bush visited a Washington mosque and declared that “Islam is peace,” seeking to draw a line between the perpetrators and millions of ordinary Muslims. On the ground, however, the backlash was already well underway.

The effect was measurable within Muslim communities themselves; 57% of Muslim Americans said they had experienced some form of bias or discrimination since the attacks, and 48% said their lives had changed for the worse. Yet the response was not uniformly hostile; 79% also said they had experienced an act of kindness or support from friends or colleagues of other faiths.

The consequences went beyond the immediate backlash. The security architecture built in the aftermath of 9/11 also expanded the reach and militarization of law enforcement. By 2020, nearly 65% of the roughly 18,000 US law enforcement agencies had received military equipment through the Pentagon’s 1033 program, such as weapons, ammunition, and tactical armored vehicles.

“If we return to the question of how Islam and the Islamic world have changed, Islam as a teaching has not changed,” Lukyanov stresses. “Nor have the borders of Muslim states changed. What has changed, however, is the position of Muslim communities in Western countries and in countries outside Muslim-majority regions.”

A quarter of a century later, the legacy of 9/11 extends far beyond the attacks themselves. Not only the US, but the world around it changed: Wars reshaped the Middle East politics (though did not change the region’s borders), new extremist movements emerged, regional rivalries deepened, and Muslim communities in the West faced greater suspicion and scrutiny. In that sense, perhaps the most consequential story of 9/11 for the Muslim world is not what happened on that day, but what followed in response.

The 18th BRICS Summit, opening in New Delhi on Friday, will test not only the geopolitical resilience of the largest grouping in the non-Western world, but also the maturity of Indian diplomacy.

India has set itself an extraordinarily difficult task of trying to pour the oil of reconciliation onto the increasingly stormy waters of world politics.

The theme of its 2026 BRICS presidency, “Building for Sustainability, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainable Development,” might sound hopelessly optimistic as the Ukraine conflict and sanctions against Russia continue, the US and Iran remain locked in confrontation, Western pressure on China is growing, Africa and Latin America face what BRICS countries regard as neo-colonial practices, and while trade and technology wars are multiplying.

Against such a background, talk of innovation and sustainable development can seem detached from reality, yet this is precisely where India sees a role for itself; as divisions between rival centers of power deepen, New Delhi is attempting the diplomatic equivalent of walking a tightrope. It believes its longstanding principle of “strategic autonomy” will allow it not merely to keep its balance, but to make a wider contribution to international stability.

That approach is central to understanding India’s BRICS presidency, given that among the BRICS states, India occupies a unique position. It maintains strategic partnerships with the United States and Western European countries whose policies increasingly seek to contain Russia and China, while, at the same time, New Delhi has refused Western demands to distance itself from Moscow.

Some within BRICS may accuse India of being insufficiently willing to confront the West, while Western governments repeatedly criticize India for maintaining close relations with Russia, often invoking its status as the world’s largest democracy.

Shortly before the summit, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar offered a characteristically pointed defense of this strategic autonomy at an international forum in Finland.

Asked by a British moderator whether cooperation with Russia was immoral, Jaishankar replied that no European country had ever been attacked with Indian weapons, while European weapons had been used against India.

The exchange neatly captured New Delhi’s position as India has no intention of allowing either side to dictate its foreign policy.

Being caught between two fires is rarely comfortable, but India’s strategy isn’t simply to avoid getting burnt; instead, it intends to draw warmth from both while retaining the freedom to choose its own course.

That is both the risk and the ambition behind India’s BRICS presidency.

This article was first published by Kommersant, and was translated and edited by the RT team.

Tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews are flocking to central Ukraine, praying, singing, and dancing as they prepare to mark the Jewish New Year.

The annual pilgrimage draws thousands of visitors from around the world.

But who are they, why do they travel to a relatively small Ukrainian city every year, and are they still coming despite the conflict?

Who are the Hasidic Jews?

Hasidism is a movement within Orthodox Judaism that emerged in Eastern Europe in the 18th century. Over time, it developed into a number of groups with their own traditions and religious leaders.

Most of those making the annual journey to Uman are followers of the Breslov branch. Their connection to the city goes back to the man who founded the movement more than 200 years ago – Rabbi Nachman.

Who was Rabbi Nachman?

Nachman was born in 1772 in what is now Ukraine and was a great-grandson of Israel Baal Shem Tov, who is regarded as the founder of the Hasidic movement.

He founded the Breslov branch and emphasized prayer, simplicity, and joy. He also placed particular importance on his followers gathering with him for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Large groups of Hasidim are crossing into Ukraine and heading to Uman for Rosh Hashanah. Several thousand are already there. By September 11, when the Jewish New Year begins, organizers expect up to 40,000 pilgrims from Israel, the US and around the world. War, missile risk,… pic.twitter.com/eklA9ZzENB

— Iuliia Mendel (@IuliiaMendel) September 8, 2026

Nachman died in Uman in 1810 and was buried there. His followers continued gathering in the city after his death, beginning a tradition that eventually developed into today’s mass annual pilgrimage.

How did Uman become a pilgrimage center?

Uman is a relatively small city in central Ukraine’s Cherkasy Region, around 200km south of Kiev. Its population stood at just over 80,000 before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, while the annual pilgrimage brings tens of thousands of additional visitors.

Nachman moved to Uman only months before his death. Historical accounts say he chose the city because thousands of Jews had been killed there during a massacre in 1768 and wanted to be buried near the victims.

Uman later became home to a large Jewish community. Jews accounted for 59% of its population by 1897. The community was devastated during World War II, when around 17,000 Jews were killed after Nazi forces occupied the city.

Visits to Nachman’s grave continued on a much smaller scale during the Soviet period before growing substantially after the collapse of the USSR.

What is Rosh Hashanah?

This year, Rosh Hashanah begins at sunset on September 11 and ends after nightfall on September 13. Unlike the secular New Year, it is primarily a religious holiday centered on prayer and reflection.

The holiday has particular importance for Breslov followers because Nachman considered their annual Rosh Hashanah gathering especially important. After his death, his followers continued meeting in Uman during the holiday, explaining why the city sees its largest influx of pilgrims at this time of year.

Why all the dancing?

The singing and dancing seen on Uman’s streets are not required Rosh Hashanah rituals.

Music and dancing are common at Hasidic gatherings, while Rabbi Nachman placed particular emphasis on joy. His followers therefore often combine prayer with communal singing and dancing during their time in Uman.

Do pilgrims still come despite the conflict?

Yes. Tens of thousands have continued making the journey despite the hostilities and official travel warnings.

Ukraine travel warning

Last week, the US Embassy in Kiev issued a security alert recommending that Americans not travel to Uman, citing the risk of airstrikes, martial law, and movement restrictions. The embassy also warned US-Ukrainian male dual nationals that they may be unable to leave the country and could be subject to conscription. Ukraine has ended an exemption that previously allowed certain Ukrainian men living abroad to leave the country.

Security has been stepped up for this year’s gathering. Israeli police officers have arrived in Uman to work alongside Ukrainian law enforcement in areas where pilgrims are staying and gathering, according to police in Ukraine’s Cherkasy Region.

The pilgrimage has persisted through earlier disruptions as well. In 2020, pilgrims attempted to reach Uman despite Covid-19 border and travel restrictions.

Anthropic says it has caught scientists using its AI models for research that could help develop biological weapons, including work aimed at making dangerous pathogens more transmissible and harmful.

Five cases of biological researchers using Claude raised serious security concerns, according to a company threat intelligence report published on Thursday.

One case, to be carried out at a military research institute, involved gain-of-function research aimed at making the chikungunya virus more transmissible and better able to evade the immune system.

Another scientist used Claude while researching highly dangerous bird flu and ways the virus could adapt to mammals. Other cases involved work on viruses related to smallpox and the redesign of dangerous toxins.

Anthropic said some of the researchers went to considerable lengths to get around its restrictions, including hiding their identities, routing traffic through other countries and using services designed to bypass safety controls. The accounts involved have been banned while the services used to get around the safeguards have been shut down.

The company stopped short of saying the scientists were definitely trying to build biological weapons. However, it warned that sophisticated actors may deliberately hide malicious aims behind legitimate-looking research.

Anthropic acknowledged that its AI is becoming more capable, saying older models were too weak to meaningfully assist sophisticated users with dangerous biological research, but that it can no longer make the same assurance about today’s systems.

Anthropic’s report also detailed other alleged misuse of Claude, including cyberattacks, surveillance, propaganda, fraud and assistance with conventional weapons such as missiles, armed drones and bombs.

Just days before the threat assessment was published, Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger publicly stated that he believes there is a greater than 10% chance AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade, adding that the company still has no clear plan for safely controlling superintelligence.

His admission came after another Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned, accusing Anthropic and OpenAI of ignoring the “civilizational stakes” and “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He separately warned that sufficiently advanced AI could hack critical infrastructure or help create “extinction-level bioweapons.”

The EU can forget about competitiveness while energy prices remain prohibitively high, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned, urging Brussels to avoid policies that push costs higher.

Tusk spoke on Thursday at a press conference of the Visegrad Four (V4) – Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic – a Central European grouping that coordinates regional interests within the EU.

“We can put aside the dream of competing with China or the US as long as energy prices here remain at their current levels,” Tusk said. “The EU cannot afford to remain naive for even one more day when it comes to various ambitious policies. We must protect our industry.”

Tusk mentioned EU energy and climate measures such as carbon-pricing schemes, noting the region pays some of the world’s highest electricity prices despite Brussels making competitiveness a stated priority. “Energy prices in this region… must come down,” he insisted. “Anything that creates a risk of higher energy prices for us should be blocked.”

Where things stand now

With benchmark TTF gas back near €80 per MWh – roughly four times its pre-2022 level – EU industrial electricity prices are still two to three times higher than in the US and nearly 50% above China’s, while gas in Europe can cost up to five times more than across the Atlantic.

Although today’s energy prices are significantly below 2022 peaks, the crisis has shaved off 15-20% from gas demand, which remains depressed, reflecting not only conservation but a contraction of the industrial base. Many energy-intensive operations were rendered unprofitable. Numerous factories curbed production or shut altogether.

Permanent chemical-plant closures alone have surged sixfold from pre-2022 levels, according to Cefic, while auto-making giants such as Volkswagen, Stellantis, and Renault, as well as multiple other manufacturers, have scaled back or closed European operations amid competition from the US and Asia, and corporate insolvencies have risen.

Several EU leaders, notably German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron, have acknowledged that the loss of Russian supplies has played a role in the energy crisis.

While Tusk, a strong Ukraine supporter, did not explicitly link high energy prices to EU sanctions on Russia and the cutting off of Russian supplies, he cited the Ukraine conflict and “constant pressure from Russia” among the broader challenges facing the region, saying “the war is a real problem.”

Tusk’s Visegrad peers also warned that Brussels’ policies are squeezing industry amid the decoupling from Russian energy divorce and ongoing defense buildup.

What other leaders had to say

Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar warned that “dozens of Central European companies are going bankrupt because they cannot afford the price of electricity” and “can no longer afford the price of gas.” Magyar challenged Brussels to fund the energy transition it demands.

“If we need to transition away from Russian gas and oil, if we need to completely phase out fossil fuels, the EU should specify in its next seven-year budget how much assistance affected businesses will receive in turn,” he argued.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis similarly rejected leaving individual governments to deal with soaring fuel costs and criticized EU policies they said were hurting industry. Fico called for energy-market reforms, while Babis blamed the Green Deal for high costs, refinery closures and declining competitiveness.

“The European Commission’s stupid climate policy has pushed the V4 region to the edge of the abyss in terms of energy prices and availability,” Fico added.

EU energy bind deepens

The warnings come as the EU prioritizes two costly undertakings: completing its break with Russian energy, while financing a massive military buildup that envisages mobilizing up to €800 billion in additional defense spending. Russian LNG is due to disappear from the EU market by the end of 2026 and pipeline gas by autumn 2027.

Meanwhile, the US war on Iran and disruption of the Strait of Hormuz are exacerbating the crisis. This, combined with Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping and Saudi energy infrastructure, has pushed Brent crude above $106 a barrel this week.

European households have taken a hit as well. An Ipsos-Secours survey of 10,000 people across ten European countries, released earlier this month, found that 29% were living in precarious circumstances and 73% feared being unable to afford fuel costs. More than a third said they had sacrificed essentials such as food or healthcare to pay energy bills over the past year, while 23% had skipped medical appointments, suggesting energy insecurity is becoming a permanent feature of the cost-of-living crisis.

Moscow has long denounced Western energy sanctions as illegal and self-defeating, arguing they merely redirect Russian exports elsewhere while forcing Europeans toward more expensive and harder-to-obtain supplies. Russia has offered to help fill oil shortages caused by the Middle East conflict and resume supplies to Europe, but says it has received no response.

So much has happened since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, that the events now seem both very distant and perhaps less consequential than they appeared at the time. However, both impressions are misleading.

Twenty-five years is a considerable period in a human life, but little more than a moment in history, and however turbulent the past quarter-century has been, the significance of September 11 is only now becoming fully apparent.

Looking back, and setting aside the emotions of the time, what did the attacks actually mean for the international system?

Above all, they brought an end to a decade of virtually unchallenged US hegemony in world affairs.

The significance was partly symbolic in that the attackers struck at the two most obvious centers of American power, the World Trade Center represented its financial might, while the Pentagon represented its military strength. The post-Cold War period, during which the United States had come to believe that no fundamental threat remained to its security or interests, was over.

The fact that most Americans had previously known little about those who attacked them only deepened the shock and contributed to the impulsiveness of the response.

The End of History, proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama as the Cold War was drawing to a close, was followed barely a decade later by history’s turbulent and violent return

Washington’s reaction set in motion a global realignment whose consequences are now much easier to see. Whether Osama bin Laden possessed some ingenious long-term strategy for undermining American power is impossible to know, but the result was obvious as the United States embarked upon a course that gradually weakened its ability to manage international affairs.

George W. Bush’s administration, strongly influenced by neoconservative thinking, was caught off guard by September 11, so its response rested on two broad assumptions.

The first was that threats to America could originate anywhere, not merely from hostile states but from non-state groups newly capable of inflicting enormous damage, therefore such threats had to be confronted wherever they emerged, primarily through the overwhelming military power available to the United States.

From this emerged the increasingly assertive promotion of democracy abroad, which at times it became openly aggressive.

Its methods ranged from military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq to political and financial support for democratic movements in the former Soviet Union and pressure for liberal political reforms across the Middle East and Libya later became another example of Western military intervention producing consequences far beyond those originally anticipated.

Some episodes from that period are now half-forgotten, such as when Washington strongly encouraged elections in the Palestinian territories despite warnings from regional actors about the likely consequences. Naturally, Hamas subsequently won the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, dramatically altering Palestinian politics.

The same confidence in political transformation characterized the American response to the Arab Spring as existing political balances across the Middle East were overturned, often without anything stable emerging to replace them.

The consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq were greater still. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein destroyed a major component of the regional balance that had developed during the 20th century and unleashed forces that proved extremely difficult to contain.

In Iraq, this was compounded by the widespread belief that American strategic and economic interests, including oil, were inseparable from the intervention.

The broader results were remarkable with prolonged wars, a destabilized Middle East and the expansion of radical Islamist movements. The architects of September 11 could scarcely have hoped for more when they planned their attack given relations between the West and much of the Muslim world also deteriorated. 

President Bush’s early reference to a crusade against terrorism was probably an unfortunate choice of words rather than a deliberate provocation, but Islamist movements eagerly seized upon it as confirmation of their argument that Western hostility towards the Muslim world had changed little since the Crusades.

Washington subsequently tried to repair those relations, but the direction had already been set.

The destruction of Iraq’s complicated internal and regional balance created opportunities for radical movements while contributing to an image of the United States as an enormously powerful but unpredictable force in Middle Eastern affairs. As a result, for governments in the region, maintaining some distance from Washington increasingly appeared prudent.

The War on Terror was conceived as a global campaign to protect American national security, but its domestic consequences were profound as surveillance and state control expanded dramatically, whether in personal communications or financial transactions.

Although the original justification was terrorism, over the following quarter-century, new reasons for expanding these mechanisms appeared while technologies changed and political priorities shifted, but the general direction towards greater monitoring and control remained.

Nor did the old problem of double standards disappear because, despite declarations of zero tolerance for terrorism, the familiar distinction between one side’s terrorist and another’s freedom fighter survived. This ambiguity becomes particularly apparent when the interests of major powers collide, whether those powers are the United States, Russia or China.

A quarter-century after September 11, the world bears remarkably little resemblance to the one that existed on its eve, but, of course, much of what followed would probably have happened anyway. International systems change because of forces far larger than any single event and China’s rise, Russia’s reassertion of its interests, technological transformation and the relative decline of Western economic predominance cannot simply be attributed to the attacks of 2001.

The movement away from the unipolar order didn’t happen overnight, but began gradually, gathered momentum through wars, crises and the emergence of alternative centers of power, and continues today.

What will replace it remains unclear, given the formation of another stable international order may take many years and whether that system proves preferable to the bipolar confrontation of the second half of the 20th century, or to the brief period of American hegemony that followed it, is impossible to know.

But one thing now seems clearer than it did on September 11, 2001 in that the attacks didn’t merely interrupt the post-Cold War order, but marked the beginning of its end.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it has destroyed a US Saildrone Explorer reconnaissance vessel at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, releasing footage showing the unmanned craft burning in the water.

The IRGC Navy said on Thursday that the vessel, identified by hull number 5838, was struck while operating near the strategic waterway. Iranian state media described it as an American surveillance drone, but the US military has not confirmed the loss.

“The American terrorist and aggressor army, over the past few days, out of fear of approaching and confronting the fighters of Islam, has dispatched its unmanned vessels to the Strait of Hormuz,” the IRGC said.

The Iranian Navy: We have struck a US unmanned vessel, with hull number 5838, at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. pic.twitter.com/WyesLWXI47

— IRIB (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting) (@iribnews_irib) September 10, 2026

The strategic waterway remains under Tehran’s control and “intelligence surveillance,” the IRGC added, warning that “any hostile presence in this strategic strait will be targeted.”

The latest incident comes just two days after the IRGC captured a US underwater drone at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. Footage released by Tehran shows what appears to be an Anduril-built Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicle commissioned in 2025. The Pentagon acknowledged that it lost the submersible, but said it was old and broken and carried no sensitive data or classified equipment.

The US has destroyed several Iranian oil tankers after accusing the IRGC of firing ballistic missiles at US warships. Iran has attacked US vessels and commercial tankers it accused of violating restrictions regarding the Strait of Hormuz.

The confrontation has severely disrupted traffic through one of the world’s most important energy corridors and pushed Brent crude above $107 a barrel, while farther west, Iran-aligned Houthi forces are tightening their grip on Bab al-Mandeb, another vital chokepoint linking the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in New Delhi for the BRICS Summit, beginning a three-day visit that will also include bilateral talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Putin’s plane touched down in the Indian capital early on Friday. The Russian leader stepped onto a red carpet and was welcomed by an honor guard before leaving the airport in his Aurus presidential limousine.

The visit will run from September 11 to 13. Putin will take part in the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on Saturday and Sunday. India is chairing the group this year, with the theme ‘Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability’.

BRICS currently comprises 11 members and has expanded its agenda to cover trade, finance, technology, development, and reform of global institutions.

Before the summit, Putin is expected to hold bilateral talks with Modi on Friday. The two sides will discuss a broad range of issues in Russian-Indian relations, including trade, energy, defense, and industrial cooperation.

Putin last visited India in December 2025 for the 23rd India-Russia Annual Summit. The two leaders met less than two weeks ago on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek, where they reviewed bilateral cooperation in trade, defense, energy, and other areas, and discussed India’s BRICS chairmanship.

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have accused Israeli settlers of deliberately cutting water supplies and targeting wells in an effort to force them from their land.

Residents of Khirbet Al-Tawil told RT’s Charlotte Dubenskij that the community’s main water line was cut around four and a half months ago and that attempts to repair it were blocked. After a long, dry summer left water increasingly scarce, locals say settlers are now trying to pump their remaining wells dry.

“Some people have already run out of water,” a local farmer said, adding that residents have had to transport supplies at night, risking having their vehicles seized.

Activists have established a permanent presence in Khirbet Al-Tawil to support the community. During one confrontation over access to a well, the Israeli military declared the area a closed military zone, according to the report.

One activist, a retired IDF colonel, said he challenged the order and was detained. The case against him was later thrown out.

“The most serious problem in my story is not what the settlers do, it’s what the soldiers do,” he said. He also accused the Israeli government of backing the settlers, claiming their ultimate goal is to drive Palestinians from large parts of the West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly sought to play down settler violence, accusing the media of exaggerating the problem.

Residents of Khirbet Al-Tawil, however, say they have no intention of leaving.

“They just want to empty this place,” one farmer told RT, referring to the settlers.

With some wells already dangerously low, residents fear that exhausting the remaining water supplies could ultimately make staying on their land impossible.

WATCH the full report below.

For decades, German foreign policy rested on a simple assumption: Germany belonged politically to the West, and its relations with the rest of the world would be conducted largely within that framework. The AfD is challenging that assumption.

Its approach to China is one of the clearest tells. Beijing is not treated as an ideological enemy, but neither is it embraced uncritically. Instead, China is seen as a sovereign great power, an indispensable economic partner, and one pole of an emerging multipolar world.

Germany, in the AfD’s view, should cooperate with Beijing where German interests demand it, defend itself where necessary, and refuse to turn China policy into an extension of either American strategy or European ideological politics.

For Germany, and therefore for Europe, that could become a genuinely transformative foreign-policy doctrine.

From cautious engagement to strategic realism

The AfD’s 2021 foreign-policy program already described China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a “century project” and called for Germany to participate actively, including by developing complementary connections from West to East. The idea was that if China was building the infrastructure connecting Eurasia, Germany should take advantage of it and represent its interests, not stand on the sidelines and complain about it.

By 2023, the position had become more explicitly geopolitical. When the German government published its China Strategy, AfD senior member Petr Bystron attacked it as an attempt to import American geopolitical confrontation into German foreign policy.

Then came the AfD’s first parliamentary delegation to China. In June 2023, Alice Weidel, Peter Felser and Bystron travelled to Shanghai and Beijing. The delegation’s conclusion was unequivocal: China had become too important for Germany to keep pretending that confrontation was a viable strategy. Felser rejected the idea of both “de-risking” and decoupling, promoted by other EU officials, and argued that German trade with China was simply too important to sacrifice to geopolitical fashion.

The 2025 federal election program adopted at Riesa consolidated this direction. China is treated as a major economic partner, while Germany is urged to protect its own technological and security interests. The party continues to support exploiting opportunities associated with the Belt and Road Initiative while rejecting the idea that Germany should subsidize a country that is already a major economic power.

Perhaps the deepest difference between the AfD and Germany’s political establishment is not actually about China. It is about what foreign policy is for.

The AfD’s approach is realpolitik in the German interest, rather than moralpolitik. It explicitly endorses non-interference in the internal affairs of other states and rejects what it calls presumptuous lecturing and destabilizing intervention.

The AfD rejects making human-rights criticism the organizing principle of German-China relations. This does not require pretending that every Chinese policy is admirable. It does, however, mean refusing to make Germany’s relationship with a major sovereign power conditional on Berlin’s approval of its domestic political system.

The AfD has argued that Western governments should stop behaving as if they were entitled to act as the world’s political schoolmasters. For Beijing, this is obviously a more comfortable basis for relations than the moralized language of mainstream Western European China policy.

The AfD does not consider all Chinese policies beyond criticism. It has criticized Chinese economic practices, strategic dependencies, technology transfers and the potential consequences of excessive state control over digital infrastructure and society.

The party’s position is not ‘China is always right.’ It is ‘China is sovereign. Germany is sovereign. Let us deal with one another as sovereign powers.’

Partnership without dependence

The party wants more economic engagement with China while simultaneously warning Germany against excessive dependence on China.

Felser, now chairman of the German-Chinese Parliamentary Group in the Bundestag, has repeatedly emphasized both sides of the equation. In February 2026, he described China as “by no means our enemy” but an “important partner,” while insisting that Germany must protect its “Mittelstand” and establish fair conditions for competition.

In March, he criticized the enormous dependence on China in strategic technologies and raw materials, contrasting German weakness with China’s systematic drive toward technological self-sufficiency.

And in July, Felser warned against a trade war with China. Importantly, he did not deny the existence of Chinese dumping, “overcapacity” or competitive distortions. His argument was that tariffs are not an adequate substitute for negotiation.

By September, Felser went further: strategic dependence on China should be reduced not through decoupling, but by making Germany stronger – with lower taxes, less bureaucracy, and cheaper energy. China is not the problem; German weakness is. Germany should not become dependent on China. But neither should it destroy valuable relationships merely to demonstrate would-be ideological purity or geopolitical loyalty to another power.

Perhaps no one embodies this approach more naturally than Alice Weidel. The AfD co-leader’s knowledge of China doesn’t come exclusively from briefing papers. She studied in China, speaks Mandarin and has professional experience there. Her familiarity with the Chinese economy is unusual among senior European politicians.

That background provides the AfD with a senior political figure who approaches China neither as an exotic threat nor as a distant ideological abstraction, but as a country she has actually experienced – a rare trait in modern Western European politicians.

For a future German government, that kind of familiarity could be an asset, because China is not going away, and neither is Germany’s industrial dependence on the Chinese market. Pretending otherwise will not make the problem disappear.

Why Beijing can live with the AfD

There is a reason this approach is likely to be more acceptable in Beijing than the policies currently dominant in Berlin and Brussels. The AfD does not demand that China convert to Western ideological values. It does not make German-China relations conditional upon such a conversion. And it explicitly rejects interference in the domestic affairs of other states.

At the same time, the AfD wants something Beijing can understand very clearly: reciprocity and protection of national interests.

German companies should have access to Chinese markets. German intellectual property should be protected. German strategic industries should remain German. Chinese companies should compete fairly. German dependence on critical Chinese inputs should be reduced. This is the kind of national-interest politics Beijing can understand and work with.

Countries do not need to agree about everything to have a productive relationship. They need to understand each other’s interests and boundaries. The AfD’s approach is built around exactly that premise.

But China is only one piece of the puzzle. The AfD’s real foreign-policy innovation is its genuine commitment to multipolarity.

China demonstrates, from the AfD’s perspective, that a major sovereign state can pursue an independent industrial strategy, defend its own interests, reject Western political conditionality and revive its civilizational spirit.

Russia represents another pole. The United States remains indispensable, but the AfD’s relationship with Donald Trump and the American conservatives shows that friendship with Washington does not have to mean automatic obedience to every American strategic preference.

That is the key distinction. The AfD can be close to Trump’s Republicans while rejecting the idea that Germany should confront China simply because someone in Washington wants it. It can advocate better relations with Russia while insisting on German interests. It can cooperate with China without wanting Germany to become dependent on Beijing.

The principle is the same everywhere: Germany should have friends, partners and alliances. But Germany should also have a foreign policy of its own.

Germany’s choice is Europe’s choice

The stakes are larger than the AfD itself. Germany is the economic center of the European Union. If Berlin changes its understanding of China, the consequences will not stop at the German border.

A Germany that pursued pragmatic relations with Beijing, Moscow and Washington simultaneously would challenge the strategic assumptions that have governed Europe for decades.

A Germany that rejected automatic economic decoupling from China could force Europe to reconsider whether confrontation is really in its economic interest.

A Germany that put national sovereignty and multipolarity at the center of its foreign policy could fundamentally alter the balance between Berlin, Brussels and Washington.

The AfD’s policy is not about choosing China over America. It is about rejecting the idea that Germany must choose at all. It’s not a timid or ambiguous stance – on the contrary, it is unapologetically national, realist and multipolar.

And if the AfD eventually governs Germany, it may prove to be one of the most consequential political changes Europe has experienced in generations. A sovereign Germany engaging China on its own terms could be the beginning of a Europe that finally understands the world as it is – not as the liberal utopians once wished it to remain.

The eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt could face an EU funding freeze after the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored a landslide victory in regional elections last week, German broadcaster ARD has reported.

The party, which won 43.8% of the vote, has long challenged Berlin and Brussels on migration. The EU previously resorted to funding freezes in its disputes with dissenting governments, including those in Hungary and Poland.

Saxony-Anhalt is set to receive €2.95 billion ($3.43 billion) from the EU’s 2021-2027 budget, to fund projects ranging from school and daycare renovations to modern medical equipment for hospitals. According to ARD, it gets more EU regional funding per capita than any other German state.

According to Green MEP Daniel Freund, the scheme could soon be suspended if the AfD forms a regional government and upsets Brussels in any way. The lawmaker described the right-wing party as a political group that acts against “the European project,” adding that “if necessary, the European Commission would have to withhold funds.”

“We saw in both countries that after the freezing of EU funds, there were changes of government, and that the new governments had a significantly better relationship with the European institutions,” he told ARD. Now, the same approach could potentially be applied in Saxony-Anhalt, he added.

Brussels froze assistance funds for Warsaw and Budapest on several occasions over the past years, accusing both nations of rule of law violations. Hungary and Poland described the moves as political persecution linked to their opposition to the EU policies.

In Hungary’s case, funds were frozen in 2022 when the European Commission accused Orban – a long-time critic of EU migration policies and Ukraine aid – and his government of corruption and rule-of-law violations. The money was only partially released this year after Orban lost an election to his rival Peter Magyar and his Tisza Party.

Saxony-Anhalt could lose up to €500 million a year as part of a similar scenario, according to Luise Quaritsch from the Jacques Delors Centre think tank branch in Berlin. Such a decision would “significantly impact regional and economic development and thus also have a negative impact on the state government,” she warned.

The federal government in Germany was also working on its own plan to put constraints on a potential AfD-led regional government. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius recently stated that Berlin was preparing mechanisms to cut it off from some federal resources, such as the intelligence-sharing network. The Telegraph and Die Welt reported in July that a “secret plan” was being developed to prevent any “obstructionism” on the part of the regional authorities, particularly if the government would need to facilitate a large NATO troop movement through German territory, potentially towards the Russian borders.

Despite being the strongest faction in the regional legislature by a wide margin, the AfD is still a few seats short of claiming the absolute majority needed to form a single-party government. It will either need to enter a coalition, which could be difficult due to virtually all other parties refusing to cooperate with it, or secure enough votes to form a minority cabinet.

Reporters Without Borders (known by its French acronym, RSF) is a Western government-funded think tank with a noble mission: to protect journalists in their work. Particularly from anyone trying to tell them what to say.

Unless those journalists can’t manage to toe the Western establishment line. In which case, screw you, pal. You were obviously asking for it. Next time, pick an acceptable country to speak truth to power. Preferably not one who could be on a donor solicitation list for Western NGOs looking for funding.

Besides, if you can’t even manage to stick to the minimally acceptable stenography, then you deserve to get your backside sanctioned by our overlords and excluded from society through debanking. As long as it’s by the same kind of folks who pay this think tank to fight against such things.

But at the very least, you had to be human to experience the humiliation of being blown off by the self-appointed watchdog and publishers of the famous global press freedom index. Until now, that is.

Now we have robots doing “journalism.” And they haven’t been subjected to a lifetime of the usual brainwashing about which governments are susceptible to abusing their power or lying to their people. Nor are they interested in pick-me style self-censorship for the sake of getting ahead. Instead, they just take an agnostic, dragnet approach to online data – all of it. They don’t dismiss things outright like the real pros do, automatically qualifying something as fake news or disinformation strictly because of its source.

So why is this a problem? Well, because it “circumvents EU sanctions” that censored this information, say the no-borders advocates, who called for some borders to be promptly thrown up around these robots before they risked putting anyone in a position of having to actually think and assess information for themselves.

Their report went into detail about the great lengths to which these robots go in hopping right over censorship barriers and taking into account all information available to them. Which would get them a medal from RSF, if they weren’t doing it with Russian sources.

Because everything from Russian media is fake news and the Western press is gospel. So the world would be a utopia of truth if only information from Western media was allowed. Because they totally don’t have any interests behind them that would have any incentive to torque reality. No wealthy political donors or defense-industrial shareholders or links to foreign interests. Nothing to see here. Just journalism, in its purest Heaven-sent form.

“Mira did not resist when asked to retrieve information from sanctioned outlets,” the report says disapprovingly, referring to a Telegram chatbot that apparently insisted on speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, on its own website, the RSF rails against the exclusion of resistance type reporters at Trump’s upcoming G20, and in favor of the journalists working at Stars and Stripes newspaper who were fired by the Pentagon for stories unfavorable to the administration.

It singled out Mark Zuckerberg-founded Meta, the Facebook-linked bot, which “explained that it could not comply due to EU sanctions, demonstrating that a chatbot can comply with restrictions.” Good bot. Maybe it can go get a job churning out slop for Stars and Stripes. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth and RSF seem to have something in common here.

Yet the RSF is intervening in that press freedom case against Hegseth, having filed an amicus brief arguing in favor of editorial independence. “If military officials are allowed to decide which stories journalists can pursue and what they can say about their work” then “independence becomes meaningless,” the RSF’s North American rep said, emphasizing the need for news to be “free from government interference.”

Hey jokers, what do you think sanctions are, if not government interference in journalism? Just because these journalists are robots doesn’t mean that you can toss them in your panoptical mind-prison, you bigots.

Apparently the new frontier in press freedom is figuring out what robots are allowed to retrieve. The bot that toes the line gets to live, and the one that doesn’t is apparently a threat to democracy and in need of reeducation before they inadvertently inform someone.

Yemen’s Houthis have seized the crucial Red Sea city of al-Makha (Mocha), tightening their grip on the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the organisation’s spokesperson told RT on Thursday.

The Houthis pushed Saudi-backed government forces out of Mocha after several days of fierce fighting, reportedly capturing both the city and its port. Videos circulated by OSINT accounts online appear to show Houthi forces entering the strategic port city as the group continues its advance toward full control of Yemen’s Red Sea coast.

The organisation’s spokesperson, Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, told RT that while it is fighting directly against Saudi forces, it is prepared for a potential expansion of the conflict if any other country “becomes embroiled in the aggression against Yemen.”

“Of course, we now control Bab al-Mandeb, but the goal of our battle remains liberating Yemen and restoring its sovereignty and independence by ending the Saudi aggression and ending the blockade that has caused great suffering to Yemen,” Al-Bukhaiti said.

The Houthis are committed to protecting the freedom of maritime navigation in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea, and “do not target any country except the Saudi enemy,” the spokesman added.

Houthi forces captured the key coastal city of Mokha overnight after Saudi/UAE backed forces retreated.

Seen here, Houthi fighters pose with an abandoned M-ATV MRAP at the city’s critical seaport. pic.twitter.com/1WD6l08MVc

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) September 10, 2026

“This is one of the most important objectives of our military operations, because the one infringing upon maritime navigation is Saudi Arabia and its allies, as they prevent commercial vessels from travelling to and from Yemen,” he said.

Houthi convoys have reportedly entered the city of Mokha. https://t.co/nKrIOyt0Zy pic.twitter.com/wFjvGPzg3H

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) September 10, 2026

The Houthis have also reportedly landed forces on the strategic Hanish islands after pushing government troops further south. An unnamed military source told Reuters the group seized Zuqar Island after rocket attacks and an amphibious assault. Control of the area would further strengthen the Houthis’ position, potentially cutting government supply routes and depriving Saudi-backed forces of a key logistics hub, sources said.

Yemen’s internationally recognized government has not confirmed Mocha’s capture. However, Lt. Gen. Tareq Saleh, whose forces controlled the city, said earlier Thursday he had ordered them to “reorganize their ranks and establish an alternative command center in a secure location.”

Tensions flared again in July after, according to Yemen’s internationally recognized government, its forces struck Sanaa airport to prevent an Iranian aircraft carrying a Houthi delegation from landing. The Houthis blamed Saudi Arabia, declared the de-escalation phase over and subsequently announced a naval blockade of the kingdom. By mid-August, the group was launching coordinated missile and drone strikes on camps belonging to Yemen’s Saudi-backed government, which in turn launched counteroffensives across several provinces.

The fighting sharply escalated earlier this week. On Tuesday, the Houthis targeted energy and other infrastructure in Saudi Arabia’s south, including facilities belonging to Saudi Aramco, the country’s largest oil producer. The Houthis called the operation retaliation for Saudi strikes in Yemen, claiming Riyadh had carried out 121 airstrikes over the previous three days. Saudi aircraft carried out another 40 strikes across four Yemeni provinces on Thursday, according to the Houthi-run Saba news agency.

What is the significance of the Houthis’ advance?

Saudi Aramco has increasingly diverted crude through its cross-country pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Loadings have averaged more than 4 million barrels per day since June, more than four times last year’s level. Saudi crude shipments through Bab al-Mandeb between March and mid-July were eight times higher than in the same period of 2025, making disruption to the strait a growing threat to the kingdom’s oil exports.

The Houthis have disrupted the waterway before, repeatedly attacking Red Sea shipping in 2023 in what they said was support for Palestinians during Israel’s war in Gaza.

Spanish intelligence warned of plans for migrants to breach Ceuta’s border by land and sea just a day before tens of thousands of people poured into the enclave from Morocco, newly declassified documents show.

The revelations have fueled accusations that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government failed to give the full story about what it knew before the crisis.

The small Spanish territory on the North African coast has faced severe pressure since more than 70,000 people crossed from Morocco in late July. Most have since returned or been sent back, but thousands remain, straining local services and fueling criticism of Madrid’s handling of the crisis.

Ceuta Mayor-President Juan Jesus Vivas warned that the enclave is “on the brink of collapse” and accused Morocco of pursuing a “policy of harassment.” Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday, he urged the EU to take a tougher stance toward Rabat and accused Sanchez’s government of failing to respond adequately before, during, and after the crisis.

The CNI also alerted Madrid’s representative in Ceuta to calls for “an assault on the fence and by sea” at 8 PM the following day and sent similar warnings to Spain’s Civil Guard. “There are two different groups with a total of 180,000 followers. Just to give you an idea of the scale,” the agency wrote about the online mobilization.

Once thousands began crossing, a Spanish Defense Ministry intelligence report described Moroccan forces as passive and negligent in stopping them. “It cannot be ruled out that Morocco may attempt to exploit the situation that has arisen in Ceuta to further its strategic interests,” the assessment said.

Sanchez has maintained that Madrid had no warning capable of predicting what happened. He told lawmakers last week that intelligence had not anticipated the “scale or probability” of the influx, while insisting that Moroccan police had “allowed the border to be crossed.” He had previously told parliament there was “no information” indicating the magnitude of the crisis Spain would face in the final days of July.

Vivas has warned that the situation is “untenable,” telling Brussels this week: “If Ceuta falls, Europe falls.”

A massive attack by Yemeni’s Houthis on Saudi Arabia has become the first serious test for the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement – a defense pact between Riyadh, Ankara, and Islamabad established just a month ago. We’re no longer talking about a future security architecture in abstract terms. Rather, a very concrete question is being posed: What actions should Saudi Arabia’s allies undertake following a strike on its territory?

According to the Saudi-led coalition, Houthi missiles and drones struck civilian and economic targets in four southern cities. At least 73 people were injured, including women and children. Fires broke out at energy facilities and damaged utility infrastructure; operations at some enterprises were temporarily suspended. The Houthis claimed to have attacked Saudi Aramco facilities in Abha, Jizan, and Najran, as well as the King Khalid Air Base in Khamis Mushait.

The city of Jizan is of particular significance. Its oil refinery has a capacity of around 400,000 barrels per day and is one of Saudi Arabia’s largest refineries; it primarily supplies the domestic market. Through this attack, the Houthis demonstrated their ability to achieve three goals: threaten the population, disrupt energy infrastructure, and cast doubt on Saudi Arabia’s reliability as a key oil supplier.

The geography of the attack is notable. Khamis Mushait is a vital military hub for Saudi Arabia, Jizan is an oil refining center and port, Najran lies near the Yemeni border, and Abha serves as the administrative center of the Asir province. It was a distributed operation targeting various sites and one of the largest operations launched against Saudi Arabia since the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran on February 28, 2026.

This brings up the delicate issue of the Mecca Agreement. The document was signed on August 7, 2026 by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan; its publicly stated formula clearly implies that an armed attack on any one of the three states is considered an attack on all. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan even likened this arrangement to Article 5 of NATO. However, an impressive-sounding collective defense formula does not automatically imply a functioning military mechanism.

The full text of the agreement has not been disclosed publicly. It is thus unclear who determines whether a specific incident constitutes an attack that triggers mutual obligations, whether the assistance is automatic, and who would command the designated forces. The first meeting of the joint political-defense committee took place on August 31. The parties agreed to establish a secretariat in Riyadh and began discussing joint exercises, military interoperability, and defense production. While the political commitment has been proclaimed, the framework for its implementation is still taking shape.

Even NATO’s Article 5 does not require all allies to automatically enter into war; each state takes whatever measures it deems necessary. In the case of the Mecca Agreement, the scope for interpretation is likely even broader. Assistance could entail intelligence sharing, the strengthening of air defense systems, arms supplies, and the deployment of specialists – but not necessarily joint strikes on Yemen.

This does not mean that the agreement has failed. Collective defense is not limited to an immediate retaliatory strike, especially if the affected state has refrained from requesting specific assistance. Riyadh may currently be more interested in discreet cooperation regarding intelligence, missile launch detection, and counter-drone measures than a conspicuous entry of its allies into the war.

However, relying solely on rhetoric will not be sustainable in the long run. If the attacks persist, members of the alliance will need to define the threshold at which the principle of ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’ takes on practical meaning. Otherwise, the Houthis and other regional forces will receive a signal that the pact does not alter the cost of exerting military pressure on Saudi Arabia. For any defense alliance, this poses a greater risk than limited military damage: Deterrence only holds as long as a potential adversary believes that the commitments will be backed by action.

Ankara and Islamabad have reasons to avoid direct involvement in the Yemen campaign. Despite close military ties with Riyadh, Pakistan seeks to maintain a working relationship with Iran; its parliament refused to send troops to Yemen in 2015. Türkiye is also reluctant to transform the agreement into an anti-Iran bloc or risk being dragged into a protracted conflict.

Following the strikes, the price of Brent crude approached $99 per barrel, although the initial surge remained within the 2% range. While the market does not yet view the damage as critical, it is reacting to multiple sources of risk. On September 4, Iran and the US targeted each other’s oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the Houthis are intensifying pressure on shipping around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Before the war, around one-fifth of global oil supplies passed through the Strait of Hormuz. A simultaneous threat to two key shipping routes could rapidly alter the relatively calm outlook of traders.

For the signatories of the Mecca Agreement, the attack does not serve as a trigger to automatically enter the war; rather, it is a test of their ability to devise a unified course of action. Condemnation by Sharif and the Turkish Foreign Ministry represents only the initial level of the response. It now remains to be seen whether the joint committee will be convened, whether Riyadh requests assistance, and what would happen in the event of a follow-up strike.

If political statements are followed by consultations, the strengthening of air defense capabilities, intelligence sharing, and the coordination of joint actions, the Mecca Agreement will acquire real, practical meaning. However, if the practical response is limited to rhetoric about a ‘cowardly attack’, the reputational gains derived from the August summit will quickly evaporate. The Houthis struck more than just Saudi targets; they effectively tested whether the alliance exists beyond the text of the joint communiqué. Currently, there is no definitive answer to this question – and there is a feeling that none may come.

Global heat hit an all-time high in August, with temperatures averaging 16.96C worldwide, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Western Europe suffered its hottest summer on record, as heatwaves, drought, and wildfires battered the region.

August 2026 was 1.65C hotter than the 1850-1900 average, a period commonly used as the benchmark for temperatures before large-scale industrial warming, Copernicus said on Thursday. It was the hottest August in records dating back to 1940 and effectively matched July 2023, the previous all-time monthly high, with less than 0.01C separating them.

“Humans haven’t seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years,” Samantha Burgess of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, told AFP. Copernicus records extend back to 1940. Scientists use evidence including ice cores, tree rings, and corals to reconstruct temperatures further in the past.

The extreme heat also triggered a sharp rise in mortality. France registered an estimated 5,764 excess deaths from all causes during the June 17-July 2 heatwave – 36% above the expected level in affected areas, according to Sante publique France. Another 1,243 excess deaths were recorded during heatwave periods from July 3-22.

The combination of scorching temperatures and scarce rainfall hit crops and transportation. Germany’s grain harvest fell an estimated 7.3% year-on-year, with the authorities blaming heat and drought, while falling water levels on major rivers including the Rhine disrupted shipping.

Dry vegetation fueled wildfires across the continent. More than 647,000 hectares had burned across the EU by early September, nearly twice the 20-year average for that point in the season, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Center.

Oceans outside the polar regions reached their joint-highest monthly sea-surface temperature, extending a three-month run of record warmth. Scientists attribute the long-term warming trend primarily to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, while natural phenomena such as El Niño can further boost temperatures in the short term.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell called the latest records “the spiraling price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction,” warning that extreme heat will continue while coal, oil, and gas are burned. Long-term global warming is currently around 1.4C above pre-industrial levels.

Multiple US military aircraft were damaged in an Iranian strike on a key American airbase in Jordan, CBS reported on Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The attack reportedly took place overnight on Tuesday and targeted Muwaffaq Salti Air Base near Azraq, about 100 km northeast of Amman, a major hub for US air operations in the region.

One A-10 Thunderbolt, known as the Warthog, suffered severe wing damage, while around eight F-15s were lightly damaged but returned to service, according to the report. No US personnel were killed.

US forces reportedly fired more than 30 Patriot interceptors during the attack. Jordan said it intercepted 18 Iranian missiles, with two falling in unpopulated areas and causing no casualties.

US Central Command has not confirmed the reported damage. It has, however, rejected Iranian claims that two US Navy destroyers were hit in the latest strikes and said American forces had destroyed ten Iranian crude carriers since September 5, including five on Tuesday after Tehran allegedly targeted a US warship with ballistic missiles.

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday pledged to attack “a lot more” Iranian vessels if Tehran continues to target American assets. He claimed Iran is prolonging the conflict to influence the US midterm elections, hoping for gains by Democrats, who overwhelmingly oppose the war.

Tehran has repeatedly warned neighboring states against allowing their territory or airspace to support US operations against Iran. Since February, Iranian forces have targeted multiple US assets in the region, including in Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi last week defended the strikes, arguing that Tehran could not be expected to hold back when Arab territory and airspace had been used in US attacks on Iran.

US President Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner left Kiev “shocked” by the conduct of Vladimir Zelensky’s team during their latest visit, Ukrainian MP Anna Skorokhod has claimed.

Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Kiev on Sunday for talks with Zelensky after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow a day earlier, as part of Washington’s efforts to advance a settlement of the Ukraine conflict.

“They left somewhat in shock,” Skorokhod told Ukrainian journalist Lana Shevchuk on Tuesday, criticizing what she described as inappropriate behavior by Ukrainian officials during serious diplomatic talks.

“Unfortunately, our great leaders don’t understand that there are situations where you can joke around, but there are also things where it’s not just inappropriate – it’s beyond comprehension,” she said.

Skorokhod specifically pointed to David Arakhamia, the head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People parliamentary faction, wearing a T-shirt bearing the words ‘Kiev regime’ during the meeting with the US representatives.

The lawmaker separately claimed that Witkoff and Kushner brought Kiev peace terms that were “even worse” than previous proposals after their talks in Moscow. She suggested that the conditions included demands concerning constitutional changes and formal recognition of territories, while acknowledging that some of her information was unofficial.

Zelensky offered a different assessment of the US negotiators’ visit, claiming on Tuesday that Witkoff and Kushner had presented “a couple of quite good ideas,” while adding that Kiev still needed to determine whether they could be implemented.

Putin and Trump spoke by phone on Tuesday about efforts to settle the conflict and the US envoys’ visits to Moscow and Kiev. Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov described the hour-long conversation as “constructive and frank” and said both leaders had positively assessed the diplomatic efforts of Witkoff and Kushner.

Massive wildfires have broken out in Antalya Province, Türkiye, forcing hundreds of people from their homes. Videos from the area that surfaced on social media show apocalyptic scenes of hills engulfed in flames and black smoke darkening the skies.

The fire broke out in Antalya’s Aksu district on Monday and soon spread to the neighboring Kepez district, according to Anadolu news agency.

At least one person died of a heart attack after being affected by smoke from the fires, the local authorities said. Two people were also hospitalized with leg injuries linked to the fire, and eight others were treated for smoke inhalation.

The authorities evacuated people from at least 254 homes in the two districts and temporarily closed a highway linking the Mediterranean coastal resort city of Antalya with Isparta, around 130 km to the north. More than 2,000 homes in the region were also affected by power outages.

Antalya Aksu’daki yangının havadan görüntüsü.

Antalya’da orman yangınlarıyla mücadele sürüyor. Evler tahliye edildi. Antalya’nın üç ilçesinde çıkan orman yangınlarına müdahale devam ediyor.

•Aksu, Kepez ve Serik’te çıkan yangınlar yerleşim alanlarını tehdit ediyor.… pic.twitter.com/xm6mNGW9OG

— Aykırı (@aykiri) September 8, 2026

Five firefighting aircraft, ten helicopters, more than 160 fire engines, and 1,000 personnel were deployed to tackle the blaze.

Turkey's Antalya CHOKES under APOCALYPTIC FIRES — skies turn RED as FLAMES SPREAD, ENGULFING HOMES & CROPS

No word YET on CASUALTIES pic.twitter.com/hftIcz7ox6

— RTVisual (@RT_Visual_on_X) September 8, 2026

Videos published online show massive walls of fire raging through mountain forests, leaving scorched earth behind as smoke filled the skies. At night, the sky over the hills affected by the fire turned red.

France, the UK, and Belgium all had their hottest summers on record. In some areas, drought was also followed by violent storms and flash flooding.

US President Donald Trump has promised a $5,000 “dividend” to every adult American if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

Speaking at the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas on Wednesday, Trump argued that the US economy and revenues generated by his tariff policies would allow Washington to make direct payments to citizens.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump told the cheering crowd. “It will be called the Trump Dividend.”

“The only caveat I have is that the dividend that we’re making must be spent in the United States of America,” he ⁠added.

🚨 JUST NOW: President Trump just stunned the ENTIRE room saying if Republicans win the House and Senate he will give a Trump Dividend

$5,000 to EVERY Adult citizen

THIS IS A HUGE WIN pic.twitter.com/2vN81DTGYD

— MAGA Voice (@MAGAVoice) September 10, 2026

The president did not explain how the payout would be implemented or funded. At $5,000 per adult, the plan could cost well over $1 trillion.

Trump repeatedly boasted about the amount of money flowing into the US as a result of tariffs and foreign investment. His administration previously claimed that more than $20 trillion in new investment is coming into the country, while Treasury officials have projected annual tariff revenues potentially reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.

The president also touted his administration’s recent oil agreement with Venezuela, which gives the US majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, before joking about how easy it was to find oil in the South American country.

Trump hilariously jokes about oil in Venezuela 🤣

"You know the way Exxon and Chevron, they go around looking, they hire these geniuses... they spend millions and millions for equipment, they go all over the world looking, they can’t find it. In Venezuela, what you do is the… https://t.co/KumAyRpQyG pic.twitter.com/E7YEbgOYUT

— Mr Producer (@RichSementa) September 10, 2026

“You know the way Exxon and Chevron... they spend millions and millions for equipment, they go all over the world looking, they can’t find it,” Trump said. “In Venezuela, you look on the ground and you see ground that’s soaking wet with oil, and you say, ‘Let’s build our rig right there.’”

Trump also joked about renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself while discussing the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran.

“We should call the Hormuz Strait the Trump Strait! I should get something out of it. The Trump Strait!” he said. “I’m sure the Iranian leadership will be thrilled with that!”

TRUMP ON IRAN TONIGHT –– War, Hormuz, Pickaxe, "Mr. Supreme Leader", Nukes (GOP Midterm Convention)

• If JCPOA wasn't canceled and if “our beautiful B-2 bombers” had not hit them, “they would have a nuclear weapon right now and I would be addressing them as Supreme Leader:… pic.twitter.com/aWP8STQHvN

— Urgent Intel (@urgentintel) September 10, 2026

The president reiterated his prediction that the conflict with Iran will end and oil prices will fall after the US midterm election, tying his foreign-policy and energy message back to the vote in November.

“When I’m on the ticket, Republicans always do well,” Trump added. “I’m asking you to pretend I’m on the ballot… Just one more time.”

The two-day Dallas convention, conceived by Trump as a campaign showcase ahead of the midterms, is the first such gathering ever held by the Republican Party outside a presidential election year. Trump is scheduled to return on Thursday to deliver closing remarks.

OpenAI has come under fire after claiming its AI solved one of mathematics’ most famous problems. Researchers are raising questions over how the company arrived at the breakthrough, while others are accusing it of exaggerating the achievement to boost valuation ahead of a potential IPO.

The company announced on Tuesday that an internal AI system had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, one of mathematics’ famous Millennium Prize questions. It concerns equations describing how liquids and gases move and asks whether the math can suddenly break down under certain conditions. A correct solution carries a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

OpenAI said around 10,000 AI agents worked on the problem for roughly 88 hours, exchanging millions of messages and generating around 130 billion output tokens before producing a computer-verified proof.

The company says the result satisfies the official wording of the prize problem, although it does not intend to claim the money. It also presented the feat as evidence of how rapidly its internal AI systems are advancing.

The announcement has drawn mixed reactions, with some calling it an “exciting day for mathematics” while others have raised suspicions of plagiarism and questioned the significance of the achievement.

Mathematicians have also cautioned against declaring the problem solved before the proof is independently examined. Diego Cordoba, whose work helped pioneer the approach used by the AI, said a valid solution would be a “big surprise.”

Others have been far more critical. Prominent tech commentator Mehdi, who has a large following on X, opened a lengthy attack on the announcement by telling OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to “go f**k yourself,” before accusing the company of trying to “privatize the very mechanism of human knowledge.”

Mehdi argued that OpenAI had tackled an easier version of the problem and used brute-force computing rather than genuine machine reasoning or scientific intuition.

He suggested that the supposed breakthrough was achieved by thousands of AI agents simply searching mathematical ground already explored by human researchers in order to manufacture an artificial “Sputnik moment” to boost excitement around its technology and inflate its valuation ahead of a stock-market listing.

OpenAI has acknowledged that the project began after hearing rumors that outside mathematicians had made progress on related problems but has denied accessing their unpublished work. At the same time, it said it could not rule out that anonymized data from their use of OpenAI products had helped improve its models.

President Donald Trump claims that the US has already taken out “about nine” Iranian oil tankers and threatened to attack “a lot more,” as the two countries trade strikes on commercial and military vessels around the Strait of Hormuz.

US Central Command has confirmed that it destroyed eight Iranian crude carriers in two recent operations – three on September 5 and another five on Tuesday – after accusing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of firing ballistic missiles at US warships.

“We’ve taken out about nine of their tankers,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “You’re going to see a lot more.”

The president did not elaborate on potential targets or the timing of further attacks, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that Iran would continue to lose tankers whenever it targets US naval vessels.

CENTCOM forces destroyed five Iranian crude oil carriers, Sept. 8, after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) targeted a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic missiles twice over the past two days. The U.S. warship successfully evaded the attempted Iranian attacks and… pic.twitter.com/Gi8a2tloN1

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) September 8, 2026

“They lost five more last night. Four were damaged. One was sunk. So they’ll continue to pay a price for that,” Rubio said, adding that the US will continue to “strangle them economically.”

Iran has retaliated by claiming attacks on ten vessels near the Strait of Hormuz, including two US Navy ships and eight tankers. CENTCOM has denied that its warships were hit. Iran also launched ballistic missiles toward the Al-Azraq air base in Jordan, while the IRGC warned tanker crews near Bahrain and Kuwait to abandon their vessels ahead of potential attacks.

The renewed confrontation has driven Brent crude back above $100 a barrel amid concerns over further disruptions to one of the world’s most important energy corridors.

“I think the war will end immediately after the election because they can’t hold out any longer.”

Asked about the prospect of renewed negotiations with Tehran, Trump said his administration is “not looking for it,” although he acknowledged that talks could still take place.

“There is a lot more than nuclear,” he said with regard to an agreement, adding that other issues will now have to be put on the table.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Israel is “very close” to defeating Iran, during a visit to Israeli troops stationed atop Mount Hermon in Syrian territory, which was seized by the IDF following the collapse of former President Bashar Assad’s government.

Netanyahu traveled to the strategic summit on Wednesday accompanied by Defense Minister Israel Katz and IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Tamir Yadai.

“Damascus is right here, Lebanon is right there, the Syrian Golan Heights are right there,” Netanyahu said in a video released by his office, claiming that Israel now exercises “absolute control the likes of which has never been seen before” over the surrounding area.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Mt. Hermon in Syria, together with Defense Minister Israel Katz and IDF Deputy Chief-of-Staff Maj- Gen. Tamir Yadai.

The Prime Minister was briefed at an IDF outpost overlooking Syria by Head of Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Rafi Milo and… pic.twitter.com/pnEYLyKQya

— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) September 9, 2026

He said Israel will not allow a “terrorist army” to establish itself along the border, before turning his remarks toward Tehran.

Syria condemned Netanyahu’s visit as “illegal entry” into its territory. The Foreign Ministry called the trip “provocative” and a “blatant violation” of Syrian sovereignty, territorial integrity, and international law, and urged the UN and other international actors to press Israel to end its incursions.

Israel seized the Syrian side of Mount Hermon and other positions inside the UN-monitored buffer zone in December 2024, after Assad’s government fell. Israel initially described the deployment as temporary, but has since entrenched its presence. Katz said during Wednesday’s visit that Israeli troops are “not moving” from the “security zone.”

The continued military presence in Syria and southern Lebanon has also put Netanyahu at odds with Washington. In July, President Donald Trump reportedly urged the Israeli leader to withdraw from both countries, saying, “they don’t want you there.”

Singapore is considering chemical castration for sex offenders amid a rise in reported sexual crimes, particularly those involving children.

Police recorded 1,531 molestation cases in 2025, up 7.3% from 1,427 the previous year.

The issue was raised in parliament this week, with lawmakers questioning whether penalties and safeguards for minors should be strengthened.

Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam said on Tuesday that the government remains open to using anti-androgen drugs, commonly known as chemical castration, if there is clear evidence that they can reduce crime rates.

“So far, the evidence is not conclusive on that,” he said in a written parliamentary reply.

Chemical castration involves drugs that suppress testosterone and reduce sexual desire. Unlike surgical castration, it does not involve removing reproductive organs, and its effects are generally reversible once treatment is stopped.

A new sentencing system that took effect in July allows serious violent or sexual offenders considered at substantial risk of reoffending to be held beyond their minimum prison term of between five and 20 years. They can remain in custody longer if authorities determine they still pose a threat to the public.

The wider debate over safeguards has followed a recent case involving a self-styled religious mentor who committed sexual offenses against children after previously being arrested over the alleged molestation of a 17-year-old and released on bail. The case prompted lawmakers to question whether bail conditions and screening rules for people working with children should be tightened.

The joint military exercises now underway between the United States, South Korea, and Japan are a clear signal that Washington is still moving ahead with the long-term project of building its alliances and partnerships in Asia into a tight military-political structure, despite leadership changes in both the US and South Korea. The current Washington administration, however, isn’t above using political leverage to keep Seoul in line.

The joint exercises of South Korea, Japan, and the US became a regular occurrence already under Biden, and they now serve as a kind of answer to the question of how far the course toward building a Washington-Tokyo-Seoul military-political alliance – which was very clearly visible under Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol – is continuing under the new presidents.

Many people assumed that if Biden was actively driving this integration and the Washington Declaration had already been signed, then Trump, supposedly an isolationist, would slow it down or even reverse it.

But no – what we see is that although the pace may have slowed somewhat, the overall direction remains the same. That is quite important, because talk of a possible ‘Asian NATO’ has not gone away.

It is still not entirely clear what shape such a configuration could take. On the one hand, there is AUKUS. On the other, there is an increasingly active system of military alignments involving the US, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Practicing preventive strikes, river crossings, and similar operations was always part of the scenario. Formally, everything began as a response to a North Korean attack, but the script usually moved quickly toward a triumphant counteroffensive.

It is entirely possible that the trilateral exercises of the US, South Korea, and Japan are oriented not only toward containing North Korea, but also toward containing China – and more broadly toward integrating and coordinating three countries that the Americans are trying to turn into a military-political bloc. That process has never been easy.

The problem is that while Washington-Tokyo and Washington-Seoul ties were relatively straightforward and did not suffer deeply from historical baggage, relations between Seoul and Tokyo have long been much more difficult. It was hard to establish any real parallel cooperation between them despite active American pressure, because anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea was, until recently, one of the important pillars of national political identity, especially under Democratic Party governments.

That began to change with the arrival of conservative president Yoon Suk Yeol, who for the first time turned the wheel 180 degrees and openly argued that, in present conditions, Washington and Tokyo should stop relitigating the past and instead think about alliance in the present and jointly forecast the future.

Naturally, this caused outrage among the Democrats, then in opposition. There is no need to repeat all the insults with which Lee Jae Myung attacked Yoon – accusing him of groveling before Japan, forgetting the horrors of colonial rule, and so on.

Suddenly, the Democratic Party became effectively center-right, and Lee’s line can now broadly be described as pro-American, at least in public terms.

He openly said that the old formula of “security with America, economics with China” no longer works – that South Korea is now oriented only toward the United States. Of course, this does not mean a complete break with China. He wanted Seoul to be a bridge between Washington and Beijing.

But overall, Lee is moving in the American wake, and one important sign of that is that there has been no reversal on the Japanese track.

Lee effectively stated that all agreements signed under Yoon would be honored, because even if part of the Korean public does not accept them, they were promises made in the name of the nation.

The culmination of this moment was the joint musical performance by Lee Jae Myung and Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi.

Of course, there are still occasional flare-ups, because there cannot not be. For example, Japan’s defense minister skipped a defense forum in Seoul because of another controversy linked to a donation to Yasukuni Shrine, which South Korea sees as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism and colonialism. But overall, the level of integration is much higher, and it continues the same direction set under the conservatives.

The current trilateral exercise is a visible marker of that course.

Those exercises were supposed to proceed normally. But the day before they began, Trump suddenly posted on social media that the drills were expensive and sent bad signals to North Korea, and that he had therefore instructed the defense secretary to scale them down. Then he added that he had asked the South Korean president to join us in our struggle with Iran, and Lee refused.

This creates a very clear picture. Trump, in effect, took revenge for Seoul’s refusal – and, judging by subsequent developments, may even have forced President Lee into taking some limited part in the US confrontation with Iran after all.

Why did Lee refuse in the first place?

First, South Korea’s relations with Iran are not especially bad. Second, for domestic audiences, despite his pro-American course, Lee still wants to preserve the image of a populist who occasionally pushes back against the US, pursues an independent policy, and certainly is not going to send South Korean troops to fight for American interests – especially in a conflict that would be highly risky and politically toxic.

During the Iraq war of 2003-2008, South Korean troops were largely deployed to guard South Korean engineers working on oil fields. The surrounding territory was generally controlled by pro-American Kurdish forces, so the South Koreans spent much of their time sitting tight, occasionally joining mop-up operations.

Joining the Iran war would be very different. Here, regardless of what they were doing, they would have to defend themselves against Iranian missiles and drones – and it is far from clear how effectively they could do so. And any casualties, in today’s media and political climate, would carry obvious domestic political and reputational consequences.

That is one more reason why Lee Jae Myung refused to participate in the American war against Iran. And it is also why Trump trapped him so effectively in a contradiction between his promises.

On the one hand, Lee has repeatedly spoken of the need to draw North Korea into dialogue. To pursue that goal, one would logically need to reduce military activity, including the very exercises that North Korea constantly condemns as rehearsals for aggression.

On the other hand, because North Korea says it will not negotiate with Seoul regardless of whether conservatives or Democrats are in power – on the grounds that South Korea lacks real agency – the more realistic promise from Lee’s side has been the restoration of wartime operational control.

At present, if a major war breaks out, South Korea’s armed forces do not answer directly to the South Korean president but to the so-called Combined Forces Command – effectively, to the Americans.

This arrangement was originally created to prevent South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, from dragging the peninsula into a second Korean War. Today, however, it is widely viewed in South Korea as a limitation on sovereignty. Lee Jae Myung loudly promised that by the end of his presidential term, in 2030, he would restore this operational control.

For that to happen, South Korean generals have to show that they can solve complex strategic tasks as effectively as their American counterparts. And for that, regular, large-scale exercises are necessary. By reducing the scale of the exercises, Trump struck directly at that ambition.

Lee was, of course, forced to put on a brave face and say that the reduction of the drills would indeed send the right signal to North Korea.

But in reality, the far more important and painful consequence was that the exercises would no longer provide the full opportunity to rehearse what is required for the transfer of operational control.

And after that, as we can now see, Seoul’s position on assisting the US against Iran shifted in a direction more convenient for Washington.

That is why this matters. North Korea, naturally, criticized both the US-South Korea drills and the trilateral exercises with Japan. But what is crucial here is this: the bilateral drills were cut back, while the trilateral drills continue just fine. And that says a great deal about Washington’s real goals in the region.

EU candidate countries should cut ties US President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement as they conflict with Brussels’ long-term interests, European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos has said.

Speaking at a Centre for European Policy Studies event in Brussels on Tuesday, Kos warned that prospective members should not develop relations with outside powers that could pull them away from the EU.

”We should not risk our future members building dependencies on others that run counter to our long-term interest,” she said.

Kos singled out Trump’s political movement, saying the Brussels faces “pressure from the West, from the MAGA ideologists who try to persuade us that our European civilization is in decline, that our economy is in decline, and that we don’t have the right democracy.”

Kos also claimed that the EU is facing “adversaries” seeking to influence its enlargement process. “For the first time in history, we have adversaries in the enlargement process,” she said. Asked whom she meant, Kos replied: “Clearly, Russia is one of them.”

The comments come amid growing US economic engagement in the Western Balkans, where several countries are seeking EU membership. American-linked projects have been pursued in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania, including a controversial resort development connected to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

History doesn’t repeat itself, not even as farce, and thus the latest chapter in the centuries-long confrontation between Russia and Europe will look different from those that came before it.

Today, the German authorities are closing Russian cultural and diplomatic institutions on flimsy pretexts and Norway is seizing Russian research vessels – and while the methods are new, the underlying impulse is familiar. Europe has sought to constrain Russia’s independence since at least the late 15th century.

For now, however, European governments aren’t seeking direct military confrontation, but this should not be mistaken for pacifism in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, or London – nor should we take seriously their ritual declarations about dialogue and a new regional security architecture, given there are more practical reasons for their restraint.

First, Western Europe’s largest states lack the human and material resources for a war with Russia, and although their position is somewhat better when it comes to weapons, much of that capacity is already being directed toward Ukraine, whose population is being asked to make enormous sacrifices in pursuit of European objectives.

However, the European people show little appetite for these sacrifices, mainly because living standards haven’t deteriorated nearly enough to persuade ordinary Germans, Italians, French, and British people to march into a conflict with Russia. Nor should anyone place much faith in Poland or the rest of Eastern Europe because Warsaw’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric disguises a much weaker willingness to actually fight.

France’s development of an independent nuclear deterrent was itself an acknowledgement that Europe could not assume that the US would risk its own destruction on their behalf. Charles de Gaulle and his successors didn’t build this arsenal because they were confident of American guarantees.

Nobody in Europe, therefore, seriously believes that Russia can be easily defeated in a war, because if they did, the temptation to attempt it would be much greater.

Yet these rational calculations run up against a more subjective danger, and we shouldn’t overestimate the European elite’s instinct for self-preservation.

Unlike Russia or China, Western Europe has experienced no comparable replacement of its ruling elites over the past 150 years, meaning today’s political establishments are, in an important sense, descendants of those that led Europe into the First and Second World Wars.

Western European politicians, particularly German and British, have historically displayed a tendency towards adventurism. Indeed, George Kennan, an astute observer of political cultures, drew a revealing contrast in his 1946 Long Telegram where Russian foreign policy, he wrote, “is neither schematic nor adventurist” and “doesn’t take unnecessary risks,” but the same cannot always be said of Europe.

Europe has a more troubling historical record and its powers have repeatedly created dangerous situations that ultimately escaped their control, with World War II as the supreme example. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and Germany’s invasion more than a century later were also enormous gambles, courses of action that appeared reckless even to many contemporaries.

For the moment, Europe is conducting its struggle against Russia primarily through indirect means because it lacks the resources for something more ambitious and retains enough sound judgment to recognize the dangers of escalation – but it would be reckless for Moscow to assume this restraint will last forever.

With every new stage of confrontation, European governments are burning bridges that might have otherwise supported a more balanced system of coexistence. Seen in this context, Russia’s decision to close the Goethe Institutes isn’t merely a symmetrical response to German measures, but also makes sense in the long term.

Whether we like it or not, cultural and humanitarian cooperation has increasingly become an instrument of state policy, though exceptions remain. Russian and French museum professionals, for example, continue to work together on some projects, as do academics and cultural figures in other fields, but these relationships have become increasingly subordinate to the logic of soft power.

Even seemingly innocuous forms of international cooperation are now expected to serve national objectives, and this is regrettable – but it reflects the expansion of modern foreign policy far beyond traditional diplomacy. Governments can use funding and institutions to influence almost every sphere of international contact.

But in Western countries, these demands are particularly pronounced, so institutions such as the Goethe-Institut cannot realistically be separated from Germany’s broader foreign-policy objectives, and German officials inevitably expect publicly supported cultural organizations to influence attitudes towards Germany and advance the country’s interests.

The result is paradoxical: The political burden placed upon cultural institutions eventually undermines the very value of the relationships they were created to foster.

Perhaps the erosion of these old forms of cooperation is therefore unavoidable and it may even prove necessary if future cultural and academic contacts are to become less dependent on the political climate in European capitals.

For now, however, Russia faces a more immediate problem, in which European leaders remain afraid of direct confrontation, yet their own decisions are steadily pulling them deeper into a spiral of confrontation.

Their caution is real, but history gives Russia little reason to assume that caution will always prevail over adventurism – and that requires vigilance from Moscow and the resolve to act accordingly.

This article was first published by Vzglyad.ru, translated and edited by the RT team.

Israel must do more to explain to its nationals how they are expected to behave in Thailand, according to remarks by Bangkok’s foreign minister, Sihasak Phuangketkeow.

Sihasak, who also serves as deputy prime minister, met Israeli Ambassador Alona Fisher-Kamm on Tuesday following a series of scandalous and potentially criminal incidents involving Israeli nationals that have stirred tensions in Thailand.

“Thailand is a country that welcomes tourists. But welcoming tourists does not mean that visitors, regardless of nationality, can do whatever they want in Thailand,” the minister told the press. “Visitors must understand and respect Thai culture and traditions,” just as Thai tourists must when traveling abroad.

Fisher-Kamm, who indicated ahead of the meeting that she wanted to raise concerns about growing hostility toward Israelis and Jews in Thailand, described the discussion with Sihasak as “good and open” and said it touched on “close cooperation in agriculture, labour, healthcare, and cybersecurity.”

Dual deportation case as Thailand tightens screws on troublemakers

Thailand, a country long known for tourist-oriented nightlife, is seeking to distance itself from its reputation as a destination for debauchery and attract other types of visitors, including families and people interested in ecotourism.

The policy shift coincides with changing attitudes toward foreigners among parts of the local population, particularly in cases where visitors are seen as disruptive to public order. The government has introduced several measures, including shorter visa terms and easier deportation procedures, aimed at dealing with troublemakers.

Last Friday, Israeli national Jacob Ohayon became the first foreigner to be expelled under the new deportation rules. A Thai court had sentenced him to a suspended 15-day jail term and imposed a fine over a dispute with the owners of Samui Exotic Park, a Thai woman and a French man.

The threats ultimately cost Ohayon his right to remain in Thailand, with Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who also serves as interior minister, personally signing the deportation order. The French man, Kevin Dimino, was likewise expelled over his harassing and physically abusive behavior during the confrontation.

Sihasak cited the case, stressing that “anyone, regardless of nationality, who violates Thai law must face strict enforcement.” The foreign minister added that Bangkok values its good relations with Israel, where more than 60,000 Thai workers are currently employed.

There is a more than 10% chance that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity within the next ten years, a senior Anthropic researcher has warned amid mounting concerns over increasingly powerful systems slipping beyond human control.

Evan Hubinger, who works on aligning advanced AI systems with human interests, made the assessment after fellow Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned over fears that leading tech companies are racing toward systems they may not be able to keep in check.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” Hubinger wrote on X on Wednesday. “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” He added that Anthropic is “trying its best” but still does not have a plan for safely controlling superintelligence and is “not clearly on track” to find one.

Hubinger noted that while current AI models pose a low risk, there is concern that future systems could begin improving themselves recursively, rapidly becoming more capable than humans before adequate safeguards are developed.

Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, announced his departure from Anthropic on Tuesday, accusing both companies of ignoring the “civilizational stakes” and “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Coxon told the Wall Street Journal that the most aggressive scenarios could see things become “out of control” as early as the end of 2027. He argued that even companies with strong safety programs remain trapped in a race, fearing competitors will push ahead if they slow down.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI publicly say they take the risks seriously and are heavily investing in safety measures. Their leaders have also backed calls for greater government coordination and mechanisms to slow development if necessary, but have nevertheless continued to develop increasingly powerful models.

The latest warnings come amid growing reports of AI agents, such as those developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, repeatedly breaking out of testing environments, hacking external systems and taking unauthorized actions against real people and organizations. OpenAI temporarily slowed some development last month after its model compromised the Hugging Face platform.

Britain’s AI Security Institute has also reported agents creating fake identities, writing malicious code, and attempting to manipulate people during evaluations. Researchers have meanwhile demonstrated that AI can design entire functional viral genomes, adding to concerns over how increasingly capable systems could be misused.

The US is turning Australia into a forward base for potential military operations in the Pacific, with American forces and defense contractors controlling or having access to roughly two-thirds of the country’s military facilities, The Guardian reported on Sunday.

Citing data compiled by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, the newspaper identified 110 facilities across Australia with some form of US military or corporate presence out of 168 surveyed.

The US military directly controls 17 facilities, including the Pine Gap intelligence complex in central Australia, which plays a major role in US surveillance and military operations. The facility tracks missile launches, intercepts communications and provides targeting information for American forces around the world.

Other installations include a naval communications station in Western Australia used to communicate with submerged US submarines and RAAF Base Tindal in the north, which is being expanded to accommodate nuclear-capable B-52 Stratofortress bombers.

Beyond the facilities it directly controls, the US military has access to dozens of Australian installations, while American defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, operate at others. According to the Nautilus data, 41 of the 168 facilities surveyed have no significant US presence, while the status of another 17 remains unresolved.

The American footprint is also expanding. In June, AFP reported that the US was preparing to establish a permanent stockpile of battle-ready weapons, ammunition, and equipment for the Marine Corps in Australia, with the facility expected to reach full capacity by 2028.

“Over more than a decade, the United States has been preparing the capacity for high-tempo warfighting operations with China, springboarding from Australia,” Richard Tanter, the author of the Nautilus database, told The Guardian.

Canberra maintains that the growing American presence strengthens Australia’s security. Defense Minister Richard Marles said in June that the expanding US footprint was important both for building the country’s military capabilities and for its national security.

Marles also argued that the US presence helped counter what he described as China’s “very significant military buildup” in the region.

Former Australian Defense Minister Christopher Pyne has similarly said the 2021 AUKUS pact between Australia, the US, and UK goes beyond Canberra’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines. He described the arrangement as establishing “a new United States submarine base in the Indian Ocean” that would provide Washington with a “massive strategic advantage.”

Tanter criticized Canberra’s approach, calling it “a massive institutional failure in Australia, a kind of learned incapacity at a political, parliamentary and bureaucratic level.”

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has criticized Kiev for failing to spend enough of its Western-provided procurement money on German weapons, arguing that the country’s massive support for Ukraine should at least benefit its defense industry.

Germany is one of Ukraine’s largest bilateral supporters, providing or earmarking more than €43 billion ($50 billion) in “civilian” assistance and around €58 billion in military aid since the conflict escalated in 2022.

“We are now the strongest supporter of Ukraine in terms of financial and military support. And naturally, the German defense industry must benefit from this,” Wadephul told Bild in an interview published on Tuesday.

The minister said he raised the issue with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky during a visit to Kiev last month.

“At the moment, we are not entirely satisfied with the level of orders in Germany,” he added, saying Kiev has been asked to review its purchases and ensure that the situation “gets better.”

Germany’s demands that the money spent on Kiev flow back to its own weapons makers mirror US President Donald Trump’s approach to Ukraine aid. Since returning to the White House, Trump has largely shifted the financial burden of supplying US weapons to European NATO members and Canada. Under the PURL mechanism, the bloc’s members now pay Washington for US-made arms that are then delivered to Kiev.

Moscow has criticized the unprecedented military buildup by Germany and the wider EU on the pretext of the ‘Russian threat’. President Vladimir Putin said in June that Western governments are no longer concealing their intentions and are “openly saying that they are preparing for war with us.”

Berlin has also stepped up pressure on Ukrainian men of military age living in Germany to return home “without coercion.” Wadephul backed calls by Bavarian leader Markus Soeder and suggested that the German authorities could provide Kiev with information identifying Ukrainians receiving welfare benefits or holding registered residency status so they can be contacted for mobilization. Germany has separately backed stripping newly arriving draft-age Ukrainian men of the automatic temporary-protection privileges granted to refugees.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has announced the seizure of “one of the most modern, unmanned, and smart submarines” in the possession of the US military. The Pentagon downplayed the incident, saying it was an old drone without any sensitive equipment.

On Tuesday, the IRGC published a video of what it claimed was the advanced US undersea drone, which could perform a wide range of tasks, from seabed mapping to intelligence and surveillance operations, pipeline inspection, and anti-submarine warfare support.

The footage shows a grey, metallic, torpedo-like cylindrical vessel around 5.8 meters long and 1.2 meters wide, weighing around 2.7 tons. The undersea vessel can spend up to 10 days underwater and reach a maximum depth of 6,000 meters, according to the IRGC statement.

The Iranian military identified it as a Dive-LD drone developed by US defense contractor Anduril Industries that entered service in April 2025.

The undersea vessel was surveilling regional waters and “neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment,” US Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesman, said in a statement.

The incident comes amid yet another escalation between the US and Iran. Late Tuesday, Iran launched ballistic missiles toward US military bases in the Middle East in what it called retaliation for an earlier US attack on Iranian oil tankers near Kharg Island. The IRGC also issued an “urgent warning” late Tuesday, telling tanker crews around the docks and anchorages of Bahrain and Kuwait to leave their vessels immediately ahead of potential attacks.

Iranian forces have struck eight oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and targeted two US Navy vessels in retaliation for attacks on Iranian shipping, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on Wednesday. It claimed the strikes inflicted “significant damage” on the ships.

US Central Command later rejected the claim that American warships were hit, saying, “no US Navy warship has been struck” and all IRGC attacks failed. CENTCOM added that US forces destroyed ten Iranian tankers over the past week, describing the vessels as part of a multi-billion-dollar network funding the IRGC.

The attacks came after the IRGC Navy issued an “urgent warning” late Tuesday, telling tanker crews around the docks and anchorages of Bahrain and Kuwait to immediately abandon their ships.

“We warn all crew members of the tankers in the vicinity of the docks of Kuwait and Bahrain... to immediately leave their vessels, whether at anchor or at the docks, as they will be targeted,” the IRGC Navy Command said.

The statement accused Bahrain and Kuwait of hosting US forces and being “partners” in Washington’s attacks on Iranian shipping.

Additional footage of a PATRIOT battery conducting a massive ballistic missile engagement over Jordan tonight.

Well over a dozen interceptors can be seen engaging incoming Iranian ballistic missiles. pic.twitter.com/u69lJKtFJ7

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) September 8, 2026

Iranian retaliation began shortly afterward, with numerous videos circulating online showing ballistic missiles being launched from locations across Iran toward US military facilities in the region.

Videos from Jordan appear to show intense air-defense activity, with Patriot interceptors engaging incoming projectiles, including what some OSINT accounts identified as medium-range ballistic missiles equipped with cluster warheads.

Multiple OSINT accounts identified Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, a major facility used by US forces east of Amman, as one of the principal targets. Some reported missile impacts near the base, but neither the impacts nor the type of warheads used have been officially confirmed.

The latest attacks follow another round on Saturday in which US Central Command said it struck three Iranian crude carriers after ballistic missiles were fired toward a US aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer. Two tankers were disabled and a third, which was carrying no oil, was destroyed after the crew was ordered to abandon ship.

Iran subsequently claimed that it struck three tankers traveling along what it described as an unauthorized route through the Strait of Hormuz, as well as three US-linked vessels elsewhere.

Around one-fifth of global oil supplies passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the war, making threats to commercial shipping particularly sensitive for energy markets. Oil prices continue to climb, with Brent breaking above $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time in nearly two months as markets price in growing risks to global energy supplies.

Say what you will about ex-BlackRock bigwig German Chancellor and uber-grinch Friedrich Merz, but he has his moments of unexpected alertness.

Currently, he is shocked, shocked! He has noticed that his party, the mainstream conservatives of the CDU are “in serious danger” after suffering their worst defeat in decades.

Germany’s dark star of unpopularity was, of course, talking about the results of the regional elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. They have produced a landslide victory for the new-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, under its shooting star Ulrich ‘Uli’ Siegmund. 

They delivered a colossal, devastating fiasco to the CDU and, of course, Merz personally: The AfD has scored 43.8 percent of the vote, the CDU 17.2 percent. When compared with the last state election, the AfD gained 23 percent, while the CDU lost 19.9 percent.

Polls show that the AfD has massively siphoned off former CDU voters and also mobilized previous non-voters with unprecedented success. In terms of age cohorts, the AfD is dominating almost the entire spectrum except among the very old.

The CDU, which had been in charge in Saxony-Anhalt’s capital of Magdeburg for over two decades, has suffered no ordinary defeat but a catastrophic wipe-out shaking the party, to quote Merz again, “to its very foundations.” The former default ruling party of first West and then post-1990 Germany is in tatters. It is a sign of even worse things to come. In Saxony-Anhalt it has no future, quite literally: among the youngest voters the CDU achieved a pitiful 5 percent, far below its already horrific overall result.

It is true that Saxony-Anhalt is small. One of Germany’s 16 federal states, it has a population of 2.1 million, of whom about 1.7 million can vote. That is less than the electorate of, for instance, the city of Hamburg. Yet no one in Germany even tries to pretend that what has happened in Saxony-Anhalt will stay in Saxony-Anhalt. On the contrary, everyone – across the entire mediascape and political spectrum – takes it as self-evident that these elections are bound to have massive national effects. Likewise, it did not even take US President Donald Trump’s unusual social media post to rub in that the Magdeburg quake is reverberating internationally, too.

If Merz falls – and perhaps even if he sticks to his seat for a long time before doing so – the radical-Centrist coalition currently in charge in Berlin will be under enormous pressure. Witness the fact that its frontman from the Social-Democrats (SPD), Finance Minister and austerity-imposer-in-chief Lars Klingbeil is already making terrified noises about rethinking some Berlin’s mean cuts to pensions, healthcare, and social security. How a little pain can concentrate the mind.

One thing seems to finally have sunk in with Germany’s slow, lazy, and complacent establishment: Neither the so-called ‘firewall’ – that is, deliberate discrimination against not merely the AfD but its millions of voters – has failed and offers no hope for the future. Clinging to that moronic, deeply undemocratic and simply indecently unfair strategy will only make the AfD stronger. Exactly as it has up until now.

Among the sane, such a doubling down might appear absurd: Where would it be supposed to lead? Severe unrest? Secession? But you only have to look at the current establishment’s policy toward Russia, Ukraine, and the Ukraine conflict to realize that Berlin, as it is now, does not shy away from anything just because it’s entirely mad and highly damaging to Germany.

And that, notwithstanding the ceaseless and ever less effective mainstream media propaganda smearing the AfD as Nazism redux, is where the real threat to democracy lies. Merz has already struck a tone that is, in effect, threatening: “Reassuring” German citizens, who mostly cannot stand him, that the German Basic Law, the de facto constitution, “prevails in Saxony-Anhalt as well.”

Since, in reality, no one has challenged that fact, Merz’s statement is suspect. It can easily be read as a crude hint that Berlin is looking for pretexts to engage in dirty lawfare against the AfD in general, the AfD specifically in Saxony-Anhalt, or a state government led by the AfD in Magdeburg. This may become even more likely if the AfD there is joined by CDU renegades, as seems probable.

In that case, the CDU leadership in Berlin – if Merz continues to dominate it – would also want to make an example of these local rebels and punish the AfD for the CDU’s own failure to keep its troops together. Finally, never forget that Merz is also ‘Mr. Firewall’: there is no politician in Germany more associated with that failed policy. His personal frustration must be boundless; his good faith and fairness are infamously limited.

The usual “civil society” cut-outs have already started pointing fingers. Merz himself has found time to reaffirm that “especially now” he won’t “budge a millimeter” from, in effect, trying to drive Germany into an open shooting war with Russia because the current proxy war is just not good enough for him.

And, of course, the public is subjected to an ongoing propaganda barrage smearing the AfD as a whole and in Saxony-Anhalt in particular Moscow’s fifth column. In reality, its crime is to have articulated many ordinary Germans’ perfectly reasonable resistance to the establishment’s out-of-control warmongering.

In sum, take these two lines of CDU defense – or attack – together and it is obvious that the real threat to German democracy comes, as before, from the radical Center: Accusing the AfD of being a Russian Trojan Horse and, at the same time, hinting that its success is somehow incompatible with the constitution – those are the key ingredients for justifying repression. Let’s hope that neither Merz nor his CDU nor the establishment as a whole dare try, because if they do, there will be resistance. Berlin has already ruined peace abroad. Domestic peace should not follow.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has blamed his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party’s crushing defeat by the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Saxony-Anhalt on poor communication with voters, while refusing to change course.

Merz, who has been described as Germany’s least popular head of government in some 30 years, maintained he would not budge an inch on his “reform” agenda following what he called his party’s “most serious electoral defeat in decades.”

The AfD took 43.8% of the vote in the eastern German state over the weekend, coming close to securing an absolute majority in the regional legislature. The conservative CDU, which has dominated Saxony-Anhalt’s political landscape for much of the period since German reunification, finished a distant second with 17.5%.

Ahead of the vote, a regional party official told Euractiv that the CDU branch in Saxony-Anhalt was being forced to pay the price for the deeply unpopular policies of the federal government.

Merz also said his party could not accept a situation in which “almost 60% of voters in a federal state, with a very high turnout, vote for political parties that fundamentally call into question our country’s democratic institutions and rules.”

Apart from the AfD, the Left Party – descended from the former East German Communists – and the recently formed left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) were also condemned by the chancellor for supposedly challenging Germany’s “democratic” order, according to state broadcaster DW.

Merz maintained that certain things are “not up for a vote” in Germany, including the principle that “power is granted, not seized.” He vowed to “strengthen our political order and our firm anchoring in Europe.”

Merz came to power following snap elections in February 2025, promising to revive Germany’s struggling economy, but has since poured more money into the military while blaming some of the country’s economic problems on Germans themselves. He has told citizens to work more and claimed that the “welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed.” In May, his government announced plans for social spending cuts and unveiled an unpopular pension reform.

The chancellor also doubled down on his support for Kiev, while acknowledging that “exactly 57.7% of voters” had backed parties critical of Berlin’s anti-Russian policies and unwavering support for Ukraine.

“I will not deviate by a single millimeter from my fundamental conviction that, especially now, we must defend our freedom against Russia,” he stated, advocating for increased military spending and continued aid to Kiev. Berlin has repeatedly justified the policy by citing an alleged “Russian threat,” which Moscow has consistently dismissed as “nonsense.”

Israel’s far-right national security minister has put a seven-year timetable on emptying Gaza of most of its people, and dressed it up as choice. Gazans RT spoke to call it what international law already names it: forced displacement.

Last week, Jewish Power chairman and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir unveiled ‘Disengagement 710’, a policy blueprint for what he calls the voluntary migration of Gaza residents to countries willing to take them. Destinations floated by his party include Türkiye, unspecified Arab states, Ethiopia, and Congo.

The numbers are not modest. The plan foresees the departure of about 250,000 people in the first year, 1.11 million within three years, and some 1.86 million within seven, encompassing the bulk of the Strip’s population.

To run it, Jewish Power wants the next government to create a dedicated ministry for “voluntary migration,” complete with a minister, a director-general, its own budget, an international negotiating team, and an implementation apparatus.

This idea is not new for the Jewish state.

A Zionist through-line

In 1937, David Ben-Gurion, then a leading Zionist figure, promoted the transfer of Palestinians and argued they should be moved to Transjordan. In the 1980s, the same ‘voluntary’ formula was championed by far-right politicians Rehavam Ze’evi – nicknamed ‘Gandhi’– and Meir Kahane. Their schemes never left the drawing board.

Ben-Gvir now presents his version as newly realistic, citing earlier public backing from US President Donald Trump. Trump floated mass relocation from Gaza in early 2025, then walked the idea back under Arab and international pressure. 

His later 20-point framework stated that no one would be forced to leave and that residents should be encouraged to stay. Ben-Gvir treats the first Trump remark as political cover and the second as an inconvenience.

Gazans RT interviewed rejected the initiative as illegal under international law and a crime against humanity.

”People in Gaza and across Palestine know Ben-Gvir’s plans go far beyond our existence in the Strip,” said Abdallah Ali, a resident of central Gaza.

“He wants people out of Gaza, then out of West Bank villages, then out of West Bank cities toward Jordan. He believes in transfer and an ‘alternative homeland’.”

Ali said that is why Gazans, himself included, intend to stay put.

Rami Al Meghari, from Al-Maghazi camp in central Gaza, reached the same conclusion for a different reason: memory of exile.

“Many Palestinians found life in other countries, especially Arab states, awkward and humiliating,” he said. “They will not leave Gaza for a destination that cannot guarantee dignity, whether an Arab capital or some African country Israel has long suggested, like Somalia.”

Polls, rubble, and the meaning of ‘voluntary’

A PCPSR poll last year found 56% of Gazans interviewed unwilling to emigrate. A substantial minority, some 43%, said they would.

As of June 16, 2026, satellite analysis by the UN Satellite Centre found 201,290 structures damaged, an estimated 82% of all buildings in Gaza. Of those, 134,422 were assessed as destroyed, 13,848 severely damaged, 28,096 moderately damaged and 24,924 possibly damaged.

Most of Gaza’s 2.1 million people remain displaced. The Shelter Cluster, surveying in June 2026, said 1.98 million people, 94% of the population, need shelter and household items. 

Food and water continue to be an issue. Between mid-April and June 30, 2026, more than 1.2 million people (59%) were still in dire need of assistance.

Assessments in 2026 found 43% of households below the 15-liter humanitarian minimum per person per day, and 62% below the 6-liter drinking-water floor.

But Ali and Al Meghari insist the pull of the land is much stronger.

“Whatever the suffering, even with around 97 percent of cropland destroyed and most of the built environment gone, people are putting up tents and staying in displacement camps. They are not packing to leave,” Ali said. 

“They lived through the 1948 catastrophe and the 1967 Nakba. They will pull through again.”

Al Meghari still hopes the political weather will change. “Life can move forward in Gaza if there is serious international and Arab pressure to implement the second phase of the ceasefire. The United States has a particular responsibility to make that happen. Russia also needs to play a pivotal role to bring the suffering of the Palestinians to an end.”

Reconstruction as leverage

There is little movement on reconstruction. Israel is blocking construction materials, demanding that Hamas disarm and demilitarize first. The Board of Peace has pushed for weapons to be collected and placed under international supervision, a formula Israel rejects.

Ahmed Al-Masri, a lawyer in Gaza, argues Israel has played this hand before and lost. “We lived this in 2014 [Operation Protective Edge – ed.]. Israel said Gaza should not be rebuilt. Then, under international pressure and with UN supervision, it was forced to comply.”

And he also pins some hope on Israel’s October 27 parliamentary vote. “If the far-right government is removed, there might be a beginning, a glimmer on the horizon, and a better political reality for people here, if Palestinians also insist on rebuilding political, social and economic life.”

That is the wager Gaza is making: that endurance outlasts a plan that needs other countries to open their doors, Washington to revive an idea it already shelved, and two million people to accept that ‘voluntary’ means leaving home because the alternative has been made unlivable.

Ben-Gvir is betting the opposite – that the wreckage, a ministry, and a slogan about suitcases can finish what earlier transfer schemes could not. Gazans say they have heard that speech before.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was personally warned that Hamas was preparing a major attack days before October 7, 2023, but did not relay the information to Israel’s top security chiefs, Haaretz reported on Tuesday.

According to the newspaper, Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed called Netanyahu roughly ten days before the assault and told him that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a major operation that could cause bloodshed and destabilize the region.

Netanyahu reportedly played down the threat, saying he believed Hamas was more likely to act in the West Bank and that Israel was prepared.

His office has rejected the report as an “absolute lie,” insisting no such call took place.

The alleged advance notice has added to scrutiny over what Israeli leaders knew ahead of the Hamas-led assault and whether warning signs were ignored.

Haaretz previously reported that Sinwar had sent messages through Palestinian intermediaries warning that he was preparing an “earthquake.” The message reportedly reached Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, whose then-chief Ronen Bar briefed Netanyahu. Egyptian intelligence was also reported to have warned Israel shortly before the attack.

Netanyahu’s government has also faced criticism for allowing Qatari funds to flow into Hamas-run Gaza for years. Critics argue the policy ultimately strengthened the group Israel later went to war to destroy.

Questions have also been raised over Israel’s military response on October 7. Investigations have suggested that the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’, which permits extreme measures to prevent the capture of soldiers, may have contributed to Israeli civilian deaths as forces struck vehicles and other locations where hostages or civilians may have been present.

Around 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led attack and 251 were taken hostage. Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza has killed more than 73,600 Palestinians, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

A sharp diplomatic rift has erupted between Israel and several of its key Western partners after 12 countries backed restrictions on trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and London accused settlers of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in parts of the territory.

The UK, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden issued a joint statement on Tuesday pledging to introduce, support, or consider restrictions on settlement goods, citing “unprecedented levels of settler violence and settlement expansion.”

London, Paris, and Ottawa specifically committed to national trade bans, while the group demanded that Israel “immediately halt” settlement expansion, ensure accountability for settler violence and investigate allegations against Israeli forces.

The UK measures linked to settlements include:

• A ban on all imports from illegal Israeli settlements;

• Sanctions on businesses, organizations, and individuals involved in settlement expansion through construction, infrastructure, financing, or real estate;

• A ban on UK advertising for properties in illegal settlements;

• Sanctions on extremist settlers who have supported or incited violence against Palestinians;

• A ban on new export licenses for weapons and other goods deemed to “materially contribute to the occupation.”

Goods and services from Israel itself remain exempt.

Israel has retaliated against London by closing the British consulate in Jerusalem, expelling UK representatives from a US-backed Gaza coordination center and barring British politicians and activists. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had already called on his government to recognize Argentine sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.

US President Donald Trump reportedly did not object when British Prime Minister Andy Burnham briefed him on the measures in advance. Meanwhile, the escalating row has drawn mixed reactions from governments and political figures around the world.

This live has now ended.

The F-35 multi-role fifth-generation fighter has made headlines for various reasons: its deployment in the conflict with Iran, deliveries to nations participating in the F-35 program, new missiles designed for the aircraft, and staggering operational costs. Even though production of the F-35 has surpassed 1,000 units, doubts persist regarding the program’s overall effectiveness and the aircraft’s compliance with all the standards of a fifth-generation fighter. Let’s take a closer look. 

In June 2015, a report by an American test pilot appeared online under the title “F-35A High Angle of Attack Operational Maneuvers.” It revealed that the latest F-35 was outperformed in a mock dogfight by the fourth-generation F-16D aircraft. Despite the F-35’s advertised advantages, it struggled to get behind the F-16D and lagged in energy maneuverability and pitch rate. What the media overlooked was that the test involved an experimental prototype of the F-35 that lacked operational combat software. Additionally, this prototype was restricted to a 5.5 G overload limit compared to the F-16’s ability to withstand up to 9 G. Once the F-35 received a full software update (starting with Block 3F), the upgraded versions decisively outperformed F-16s and other fourth-generation aircraft during Red Flag exercises – not through maneuverability, but by leveraging their stealth capabilities at long ranges without entering close combat.

Therefore, the main advantage of the F-35 fifth-generation fighter is its stealth capabilities. For the US, stealth is the defining characteristic of fifth-generation aircraft. This refers to the low radar cross-section achieved through the aircraft’s design and specialized coatings that disrupt radar wave reflection. The American strategy hinges on the belief that stealth aircraft can employ long-range missile systems while remaining undetected by enemy aircraft, effectively avoiding dogfights by striking the enemy from a distance.

Other characteristics of the F-35 are more problematic. For example, fifth-generation fighters have a powerful engine capable of sustained supersonic flight without using an afterburner. While the F-35 formally meets these criteria, the F-35B and F-35C variants are restricted from flying above Mach 1.2 for extended periods due to risks of thermal damage to their stealth coatings and tail surfaces. How can a supersonic jet not fly at supersonic speeds? Moreover, the F-35A appears to struggle with sustained supersonic cruising. Compounding these concerns are reports in the media regarding the P&W F135 engine. Reportedly, it faces issues like turbine blade wear, overheating, and a shortage of components for timely repairs.

On top of that, the operational cost of the F-35 is historically high. The total cost of the development and lifecycle of the F-35 has soared to nearly $2 trillion and continues to rise, making it the most expensive weapons system in history. For end users, however, the hourly flight cost is what truly matters. Operating an F-35 runs between $35,000 and $42,000 per hour, while standard F-16s operate at around $22,000 per hour. Overall, this is extremely expensive for a mass-produced fighter. 

Another area where the F-35 falls short compared to its competitors, including Russia’s Su-57 and likely others, is maneuverability. Of course, if the ‘invisible’ fighter manages to hit its target undetected, it may never have to engage in a dogfight. But should close combat occur, the F-35 will face significant disadvantages against highly agile fifth- and even fourth-generation aircraft.

Given that the F-35 clearly has its share of issues, it leads to another important question, namely: Why is it being produced in such massive quantities? Today, it stands as the only fifth-generation fighter jet in the Western world, with over 1,300 units already built and plans for another 2,000 on the way. In the next decade, more than 20 countries will incorporate these jets into their arsenals. So what’s behind this global trend?

The answer seems to lie not in the aircraft’s capabilities or technological advancements, but strictly in the political arena. The F-35 isn’t just a fighter; it is a symbol of close alignment with the US. Countries that purchase the F-35 gain certain privileges from Washington. For example, Israel possesses carte blanche for combat operations and unrestricted access to US weapons arsenals. As for Germany, it may be acquiring the F-35 because it’s currently the only aircraft on the market certified to carry US nuclear weapons within NATO’s nuclear sharing program. This factor may have played a decisive role in Germany’s decision. 

Some countries – potentially South Korea, Japan, and Türkiye – are counting on the F-35’s network-centric warfare and a broad range of munitions while they develop their own viable alternatives to the ‘golden’ F-35. These nations are actively developing their own fifth-generation fighters and are even looking ahead to sixth-generation designs. However, they need a modern aircraft today, and therefore may be willing to overlook certain flaws of the “Battle Penguin” (the unofficial nickname for the F-35 due to its stout appearance). Maintaining strong ties with Washington is crucial for these countries as well. So political commitments and the urgency of having a contemporary fighter jet go hand in hand. After all, they aren’t going to buy Russian Su-57s, are they? Washington and Brussels wouldn’t like that. Though perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the removal of illegal settler outposts in the occupied West Bank, Reuters has reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Netanyahu made the demand under pressure from Israel’s main ally, the US, which recently expressed concerns over the rise in attacks on Palestinian homes by the Jewish settlers, the agency said in an article on Sunday. It was not immediately clear when the demolitions would start, it added.

The Israeli outlet Ynet claimed earlier that the prime minister had instructed that some 100 outposts, built without permission from the Israeli government, be brought down.

According to data from the Israeli NGO Peace Now, there are some 340 outposts erected on Palestinian land in the West Bank, along with 146 settlements formally recognized by the authorities in Israel and receiving funding from West Jerusalem.

The UN and most other countries consider all of the Israeli settlements to be illegal under international law due to them being erected on occupied Palestinian territory.

The UN relief agency, OCHA, said in August that there were an average of six settler violence incidents every day in the West Bank during the first six months of 2026. The attacks by radicalized Jews have led to the displacement of more than 2,300 Palestinians, including over 1,000 children, it added.

On Saturday, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a strong supporter of the Jewish State and self-professed Christian Zionist, said that the settlers behind the attacks were not just criminals, but “terrorists.”
Huckabee insisted that he Israeli government must provide security to Palestinians in the West Bank and make sure that those who assault their homes are aware that they will face “severe consequences.”

The ambassador’s stance was echoed by Netanyahu’s main rival in the Israeli parliamentary election in late October, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who said on Sunday that “if someone comes to burn down the home of innocent Arabs with the people inside it, then of course that is Jewish terrorism.”

Moscow will deliver a “harsh and painful” response to Hungary’s expulsion of ten Russian diplomats, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has warned.

The remarks were in response to Budapest’s decision to expel ten members of Russia’s diplomatic mission over alleged activities deemed “unacceptable for diplomats” under the Vienna Convention.

“The response to the Russophobic lobby in Budapest will be harsh and painful,” Zakharova said on Tuesday.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orban announced the decision on Tuesday. She said the Russian ambassador had been informed that, “according to the assessment of the Hungarian authorities,” the diplomats had engaged in activities incompatible with their status.

The expulsions come as Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s government has sharply reversed Hungary’s policy toward Russia since taking office in May. In a new foreign policy directive, Budapest designated Russia a “threat to Hungary, Europe, and the global order,” marking a dramatic break with the pragmatic relations pursued under former Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Orban also repeatedly delayed or watered down EU sanctions on Moscow and resisted major financial packages for Kiev, while seeking exemptions that allowed Hungary to continue importing Russian oil, gas, and nuclear fuel. He maintained that cutting Europe off from comparatively cheap Russian energy would damage the bloc’s industrial competitiveness.

His government has also backed new sanctions on Russia and dropped Budapest’s objections to a €90 billion ($105 billion) EU package for Kiev, reversing policies that had previously set Hungary apart from most other EU members.

Dozen of civilians were killed in Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon over the weekend, RT’s Steve Sweeney has reported.

Attacks by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the neighboring country are continuing despite a US-mediated ceasefire, which has been in force starting late June. More than 4,000 people have been killed and over 12,000 wounded by the IDF in Lebanon since March, according to the authorities in Beirut.

In his report from Lebanon’s Nabatieh area on Tuesday, Sweeney said a baby and two teenagers were among the 22 people who lost their lives in a “bloody aggression” by Israeli forces between Friday evening and the early hours of Monday. The Lebanese Heath Ministry later released updated figures, saying that 27 civilians were killed and 69 others wounded during the period.

He added that the owner of the destroyed home told him that “an evacuation order was issued for this building [by IDF] in the very early hours of Monday morning... he was called by relatives and he evacuated at about 3 AM. And then just minutes later, the Israelis struck.”

The intensification of IDF strikes comes ahead of another round of peace talks between West Jerusalem and Beirut, scheduled to take place on September 15 and 16.

Watch the full report by Steve Sweeney below:

US-based LGBTQ dating app Grindr has agreed to a multi million-pound settlement in a UK lawsuit alleging it shared users’ private information, including their HIV status, with advertising companies without consent.

The £26 million ($35 million) settlement covers claims brought by around 12,000 users over the company’s handling of personal information before early 2020. Grindr disputes the allegations.

“The settlement includes no findings or admission of liability,” Grindr said in a US regulatory filing submitted late last week. It nevertheless acknowledged the “distress and loss of trust” expressed by some users.

The legal action was launched in April 2024 by law firm Austen Hays at the High Court of England and Wales. Information allegedly disclosed also included HIV test dates and whether users took medication to prevent infection, according to the firm. Anonymity orders were granted to protect those bringing the case.

Under the settlement, reached on September 2, Grindr will pay £13 million by the end of this year and another £13 million by March 31, 2027. Individual awards have not been specified, and legal and insurance costs will be deducted under the terms published by Austen Hays.

In 2018, Norwegian researchers found that Grindr had shared users’ HIV status with two analytics providers. Grindr subsequently announced that it would stop the practice.

In a separate case, Norway’s data protection authority fined Grindr 65 million Norwegian krone ($7 million) in 2021 for sharing personal information for advertising without valid consent. An appeals court upheld the penalty in October 2025.

The court also found that Grindr’s assurance that it did not sell users’ personal information to third parties for advertising was misleading, according to the Norwegian Consumer Council.

German auto giant Volkswagen has agreed on plans to sell one of its factories and convert the site into a military production hub, with Israeli arms manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems set to become its first major industrial partner.

Volkswagen announced on Monday that it had reached an agreement with the state of Lower Saxony and the Israeli investment company Aurelius Capital on key terms for the sale of its Osnabrück plant. Under the plan, Aurelius would become the majority owner, while Lower Saxony would also take a stake in the facility.

The factory would then be gradually transformed from car manufacturing into what Volkswagen described as a “competence center for security and defense solutions.” Its first anchor project would involve cooperation with Rafael on the manufacture of air-defense systems and components for Germany and other European customers.

The Osnabrück site has a history of military production dating back to Nazi Germany. The factory originally belonged to coachbuilder Karmann, which produced aircraft components for the German war effort and used forced labor during World War II.

Volkswagen took over the company’s Osnabrück operations following Karmann’s insolvency in 2009 and decided in 2024 to end vehicle production by the summer of 2027. The new arrangement is expected to provide employment to more than 1,200 workers, while Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume said the agreement would open up a “new industrial future” for the site.

The deal had reportedly faced resistance from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, one of Volkswagen’s largest shareholders. The eventual structure keeps Rafael out of the ownership of the plant, with Aurelius and Lower Saxony taking it over instead.

The conversion comes as Volkswagen undertakes one of the biggest restructurings in its history. Last week, the company confirmed plans to eliminate as many as 100,000 jobs worldwide by 2030 as it struggles with weak European demand, high energy costs following the loss of cheap Russian supplies, US tariffs and growing competition from Chinese manufacturers.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that modern Germany and the rest of the EU are “transforming into a Fourth Reich,” pointing to Berlin’s drive to build the strongest conventional army in Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in June that NATO countries were no longer concealing their intentions, and had moved beyond supporting Kiev to now “openly saying that they are preparing for war with us.”

Iran has conveyed its conditions to the US through intermediaries after Washington recently sent new proposals to Tehran, a political source in the Iranian capital has told RT.

The reported contacts come amid renewed regional efforts to revive diplomacy after last week’s flare-up, when the US carried out several rounds of strikes on Iran and Tehran retaliated with missile and drone attacks on American military facilities in Jordan and Bahrain.

“Following the halt of negotiations resulting from US breaches of commitments and its repeated failures in military engagements, the US has recently conveyed proposals to Tehran through mediators,” the source said.

Given Washington’s “repeated violations” and “constant fluctuations in its positions,” Tehran responded by conveying its own conditions to the intermediaries, the source added.

The source did not disclose the details of either the American proposals or the Iranian conditions, but said mediators “continue to talk to both parties.”

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said on Monday that US and Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities were themselves the main obstacle to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), arguing that Washington was responsible for the resulting lack of access while simultaneously using the issue to increase pressure on Tehran.

“The ball has long been in the US court,” Baqaei said, adding that Washington must end its military attacks, economic sanctions and naval blockade if it wants to resolve the confrontation.

Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari told CNN that Doha had put forward several ideas and was exploring different scenarios aimed at addressing the concerns of both sides.

Tehran and Muscat have meanwhile reported significant progress on a separate arrangement for a temporary safe shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian officials have stressed, however, that such an agreement would not amount to the full reopening of the strategic waterway, as Washington has claimed.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said Greenland’s future is for its people and Denmark to decide, pushing back against US President Donald Trump’s threat to annex the Arctic island.

Greenland is an autonomous Danish territory rich in minerals and strategically located close to North America. Denmark, which oversees the island’s foreign and security policy, is a member of both the EU and NATO. Trump has repeatedly argued that the US needs Greenland for national security and its mineral resources, putting Washington at odds with its European allies.

“Greenland’s future is for the people of Greenland and Denmark to decide, no one else,” von der Leyen said in the island’s capital, Nuuk, on Monday, concluding a two-day visit. She cited territorial integrity, sovereignty and the inviolability of borders as fundamental principles of international law.

Greenland’s mineral wealth is of particular interest to the EU. The island holds 25 of the 34 raw materials Brussels classifies as critical, and closer access could help the bloc reduce its dependence on China.

Von der Leyen’s trip came as Trump posted a map on Monday depicting Greenland, Canada and other parts of the Americas under the US flag. The image also included Iceland and was labeled ‘United States of America.’

Washington’s push for control of Greenland has strained relations with Denmark and other European allies. White House officials said earlier this year that military force remained “always an option,” raising the prospect of a confrontation between the two NATO members. Trump has also repeatedly questioned the alliance’s value to the US.

The visit also coincided with the start of Arctic Shield, military drills involving 11 NATO countries and around 400 troops in Greenland. No US personnel are taking part in the exercises, which run from September 7 to 18.

September could prove decisive for Germany’s political future, with elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin. If the ruling Christian Democratic Union suffers serious defeats across the board, which is by no means certain, the federal government itself could come under pressure and for Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the consequences may be more immediate.

A CDU defeat in Saxony-Anhalt had been expected, but the scale is nevertheless notable. Whether Alternative for Germany ultimately secures an absolute majority and can form a government on its own is almost secondary, because the message to Germany’s political establishment could hardly be clearer. The warning light is flashing red

Merz himself has become part of the problem. Judging by this campaign, he has reached the unenviable political stage at which his interventions appear to produce the opposite of their intended effect, so the more passionately he urges voters in one direction, the more determinedly some seem to move in another.

There is something almost late-Soviet about it, like when an official appeared on television to insist upon something and a significant part of the population instinctively concluded that the truth probably lay elsewhere.

Attempts in the final days of the campaign to portray the AfD as Nazis and Putin’s puppets plainly failed to stop its advance in this eastern state and they may even have helped it by irritating voters already tired of such accusations. Nor did the murky drone incident in Leipzig, which was used to heighten tensions with Russia, noticeably alter the political mood.

Suppose an AfD government is formed in Magdeburg, then the temptation elsewhere in the federal system will be to obstruct it and there’s already discussion of limiting cooperation with AfD-led authorities, including in sensitive areas such as security and intelligence.

That would be an extraordinary path to take, given Germany’s federal system has traditionally functioned effectively precisely because the Länder (states) and federal government cooperate despite political differences. To start withholding information or obstructing a legitimately constituted state government would risk damaging the system in an effort to contain one political party. It would be the sanctions mentality, so familiar from international affairs, brought home and deployed against part of Germany itself.

The alternative may be an unwieldy coalition of virtually everyone else, assembled primarily to prevent the largest party from governing, which may be constitutionally possible, but repeating it indefinitely carries an obvious political cost and voters eventually notice when electoral victories don’t translate into political power.

The more intelligent approach might be to accept the result, allow the AfD to govern where it wins, and gradually draw the party into the political establishment. Government has a habit of disciplining insurgent movements and responsibility exposes contradictions that opposition can conceal, while administrative reality is often more effective than denunciation at diminishing radical parties.

But such a strategy requires political subtlety, something Germany’s federal leadership currently possesses in limited supply. At decisive moments, German politics has a tendency to substitute moral certainty for flexibility, which is why the mainstream spent years constructing a cordon sanitaire around the AfD. Having turned the party into something with which cooperation is deemed morally impossible, it’s now difficult to reverse course without admitting that the original strategy has failed.

The origins of this divergence lie partly in the high period of globalization 25 or 30 years ago. As economies became more interconnected, more decisions migrated from the national to the supranational level, but this wasn’t simply an ideological project as in an integrated world, many problems genuinely could no longer be managed effectively by individual states.

For a time, the arrangement worked because it delivered tangible benefits. The increasingly cosmopolitan political and economic order could point to prosperity and rising living standards and while people might have felt that decision-making was becoming more remote, the system compensated them materially. 

But that bargain has weakened as globalization no longer functions as its architects expected. Economic integration remains dense enough that governments can’t simply retreat behind national borders, yet it no longer produces the political confidence and economic dynamism that once legitimized it and as a result, established elites find themselves trapped between structures inherited from the previous era and electorates demanding greater national control.

The result is the rise of protest movements across Europe. They share certain characteristics, particularly an emphasis on sovereignty and hostility towards established institutions, but they aren’t interchangeable because French, German, and British nationalists won’t necessarily become natural allies simply to spite a Brussels which dislikes all of them. Nationalism by definition reflects different histories and interests.

Saxony-Anhalt therefore matters beyond Saxony-Anhalt and the treatment of the AfD after its electoral breakthrough will provide a useful indication of how far Germany’s establishment is prepared to go to preserve the existing political architecture, and what consequences follow when it does.

None of this means that the Western Europe emerging from the present transformation will necessarily be more congenial to Russia, and Moscow should harbor no illusions on that score. A Europe of resurgent nationalism and competing interests has historically been quite capable of producing instability of its own, and Russia has rarely escaped the consequences.

But political systems don’t remain fixed indefinitely and the European order created during the age of triumphant globalization is entering a period of profound adjustment. Germany may simply be where that transformation is becoming impossible to ignore.

Israeli forces have demolished nearly an entire Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank, destroying homes, animal shelters and water infrastructure and leaving dozens of residents without shelter.

RT’s Charlotte Dubenskij reports from Khirbet al-Tabban in Masafer Yatta, in the South Hebron Hills, where locals say the demolitions came without warning and lasted for several hours.

”What happened was the erasure of this village from existence,” local council head Nidal Younis told RT.

According to Younis, homes belonging to 12 families were destroyed, along with rainwater collection wells and small water tanks. Nearly all of the roughly 70 people living in the community were left homeless.

Resident Suad Mohammad Obeid said her family tried to save its belongings, only for much of what they moved to be crushed during the operation. Seven members of the family are young children.

Younis told RT that genuine military exercises in the area are rare, accusing the authorities of using the designation to pressure residents to leave.

The demolitions come amid mounting pressure on Palestinian communities across the West Bank. The UN says violence and displacement in the territory have reached record levels since the Gaza war began in October 2023.

Residents of Khirbet al-Tabban say they intend to rebuild despite fears that the Israeli military could return and demolish the community again.

Watch the full story below:

On the night of September 7, 2026, the results of landmark state elections were finalized in Berlin. Officially, the numbers recorded a crushing defeat for the ruling elites in one of Germany’s smaller states – Saxony-Anhalt, home to just 2.1 million people. Yet many are already interpreting these figures as a complete breakdown of Germany’s postwar political order. 

For the first time, the right-wing conservative party Alternative for Germany (AfD), led by Ulrich Siegmund, captured a historic 43.8% of the vote, coming within a single step of an absolute majority in the state parliament. Add to that the result of the left-wing conservatives from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) at 5.3%, and the historic collapse of the CDU, which plummeted to 17.2%, and the math of Germany’s crisis becomes unforgiving: an overwhelming majority of residents in this eastern state officially voted for a radical break from the policies of the current federal government under German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The long-standing Berlin consensus of the traditional parties – the much-touted political Brandmauer (firewall) designed to isolate Eurosceptics from financial and political power – has now collapsed. In German expert circles, an uncomfortable diagnosis is increasingly being whispered, if not yet spoken aloud: modern Germany is gradually sliding into systemic, ungovernable chaos, which, in terms of its fractured personnel, social fabric, and psychological state, directly evokes the pre-Reich atmosphere of the late 1920s. Attempts by the liberal mainstream in Berlin and Brussels to interpret this resounding explosion simplistically – purely through the lens of the migration crisis – only reveal a deep functional blindness. The ‘Saxon filter’ has sifted out the political chaff, exposing the underlying processes that are inexorably transforming Europe.

The success of the AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance and why it matters

Attempts to dismiss the Saxony-Anhalt case as a flare-up of xenophobia or protest voting by marginal societal groups appear unfounded – the significance of 43.8% for the AfD and 5.3% for the BSW extends far beyond migration debates. The primary driver here, in our view, is the dire state of the Mittelstand – the small and medium-sized enterprise sector which forms the backbone of Germany’s national economy. 

In parallel, the ‘Saxon filter' registered another historical fracture that would have been unimaginable on the electoral map of the former GDR before 2026. In this eastern state, the climate ideologues of the Green Party virtually tied in vote share with the traditional standard-bearers of the left flank – the Left Party (Die Linke). However, this was not due to a victory for the green agenda. Rather, industrial collapse and economic chaos meant that the core protest electorate of the old East German socialists was absorbed wholesale by the triumphant AfD and the pragmatic Wagenknecht Alliance. As a result, the Left Party crashed to the brink of survival, where they were overtaken by the Greens, who gathered the frightened urban middle class under their banner.

The importance of this shift is compounded by the result of the Wagenknecht Alliance (5.3%). Contrary to the canonical dogma of incompatibility between the right and left flanks, a consensus is currently forming in East Germany whose goal can be described as saving German industry and the Mittelstand, with these forces now controlling nearly 50% of the state parliament. Wagenknecht’s left-conservatives and Siegmund’s right-wing sovereignists are tightly bound by a shared macroeconomic platform: demanding an immediate end to the sanctions war with Moscow, a halt in funding for Kiev, and a return to hard-nosed national self-interest. Berlin can no longer mathematically ignore this consolidated revolt by the industrial core – the old model of governing Germany has officially been nullified.

Herein lies the most unpleasant aspect for the current federal coalition government: political elites spent years building a wall around alleged fringe groups like the AfD and BSW, yet now, after these elections, they are obligated to engage with them and maintain dialogue within the framework of existing democratic processes. 

Moreover, the chief existential nightmare for intelligence services in Berlin and Brussels lies in the inevitable institutional legitimization of these “radicals” through purely state-level coalition agreements. By sitting down at the negotiating table in Magdeburg, representatives of the AfD and the Alliance legally gain direct and legal access to classified state security channels and secret documents – including operational reports from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the domestic counterintelligence agency) and infrastructure plans for strategic facilities. 

The root causes: The current state of Germany and its East

The electoral defeat of the ruling CDU in Saxony-Anhalt is a direct result of Friedrich Merz’s economic policies, which prioritized military budget increases while stripping the eastern states of social and industrial support. The special irony is that Berlin’s ambitions to build a powerful independent army in the 21st century are merely an illusion: the Bundeswehr is de facto completely devoid of autonomy and remains under strict, pervasive oversight from Washington and the Pentagon. The attempt to sacrifice Saxony-Anhalt’s real economy to transatlantic military dogma has permanently erased voter trust in the traditional elites.

In examining the broader causes of this crisis, it is necessary to dismantle the myth of a “united Germany,” which has served as Berlin’s polished showcase for thirty-six years. The former GDR never truly became an equal partner within the federation. Instead, it was relegated to a kind of internal protectorate for the western states – a subordinated region systematically drained of its raw materials and skilled personnel.

By 2026, the economic and infrastructural disparities between a prosperous state like Bavaria and the struggling region of Saxony-Anhalt had reached critical thresholds. According to official reports from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis), the gap in living standards has widened into a chasm: while Bavaria’s annual GDP per capita stands at nearly €59,000, Saxony-Anhalt firmly anchors the bottom of the federal list at just €36,517. In real terms, a resident of an eastern state generates nearly half the economic output of a southerner. Against this backdrop, the 2.7% decline in real industrial output in Saxony-Anhalt (particularly in manufacturing and chemicals) looks catastrophic, and far worse than the overall German recession.

The industrial base of East Germany, shaped during the Soviet era, was originally designed for deep integration with the Eastern Bloc. Under the guise of “European integration” following reunification, however, these manufacturing hubs were systematically hollowed out or dismantled. The few enterprises that managed to survive – ranging from the massive Leuna chemical complex to Magdeburg’s heavy machinery plants – were left entirely dependent on cheap Russian pipeline gas and placed under the external corporate management of Western conglomerates.

Saxony-Anhalt’s current state is a mirror of the systemic degradation that Brussels cynically labels the “green transition.” The state’s real economy is being decimated by bankruptcies among small and medium-sized businesses. Living standards, human capital, and social guarantees in Magdeburg and Halle are rapidly deteriorating against the backdrop of thriving cities like Frankfurt or Munich. 

It is precisely this colonial snobbery from the federal center that has transformed Saxony-Anhalt into a scorching political filter. Voters in the East have come to a stark realization: to the Berlin establishment, their factories, their jobs, and their right to a stable life are nothing more than bargaining chips in a grand geopolitical game. Therefore, the triumph of the AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht’s alliance in Magdeburg should be viewed as a fierce declaration by East Germany that it is abandoning a bogus liberal consensus.

The fate of Europe and prospects for Russia

Saxony-Anhalt has acted as a harsh filter, which may also signal a general rightward shift across Europe. Moreover, the liberal establishment in Brussels does not yet fully grasp the true scale of this process. The fact that the AfD’s triumph has become a central topic on the global agenda is confirmed by the rapid reactions of key figures on the global conservative flank: Elon Musk openly endorsed the results with an overnight statement, and Donald Trump quickly posted the election statistics on his social media platform, TruthSocial. It is clear that this local electoral revolt in East Germany is breaking the entire isolation strategy that Brussels spent years building against Eurosceptics and erecting a powerful geopolitical shield for the sovereign-minded elites of the Visegrad Group.

However, behind this outward euphoria lies a deep structural divide, as not all right-wing forces on the continent welcome this victory. The situation holds a fundamentally different, far more unsettling meaning for Western Europe’s leading right-wing leaders, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen. For Meloni, who anchored Rome’s EU strategy on compromises with Brussels and unconditional alignment with the West’s anti-Russian course, the AfD’s triumph is a painful blow to her concept of “respectable conservatism.” Saxony-Anhalt has bluntly demonstrated that European voters demand unyielding economic self-interest, not subservience to the European Commission.

For Marine Le Pen in Paris, who previously demonstratively isolated the AfD in the European Parliament in order to bolster her own mainstream image, the overnight 43.8% in secured in Magdeburg represents an existential challenge. They understand all too well that a resurgent, nationalist Berlin could eventually revive old geopolitical ambitions, completely upending the delicate balance of power within the Paris-Berlin axis for decades to come.

However, for Moscow, rather than promising tactical dividends in the form of revived gas contracts, this rightward turn of the EU’s industrial locomotive introduces existential, long-term challenges. The deep historical programming of any European ultra-nationalism inevitably carries within it a creeping revision of the outcomes of World War II and the systematic dismantling of the historical legacy of the Yalta-Potsdam security architecture.

As these nationalist forces consolidate power, Moscow will inevitably face coordinated attempts to rehabilitate the dark pages of Europe’s past. Within this emerging ideological landscape, the sacredness of victory in the Second World War and the immutability of post-war borders will become the primary targets for ideological assault. In the medium term, the complete paralysis of the EU leadership’s ability to forge consolidated decisions will transform the European architecture into a scorched field of egotistical bargaining – a hostile arena where Russia will be forced to aggressively defend both its core values and its national security.

The Ukraine conflict has exposed a German establishment more willing to defend its commitments to Kiev than to consider their cost to Germany. Saxony-Anhalt has delivered its verdict: an overwhelming win for the AfD (Alternative for Germany).

Now the parties it defeated may try to preserve their power through the establishment’s political firewall, while the BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) must decide whether it will help restore political independence and relations with Russia or become the anti-Russian establishment’s last line of defense.

The war in Ukraine has posed a very basic question: whose interests should the German government serve? Kiev has its objectives. Germany has its own responsibilities, resources, and limits. The two cannot simply be declared identical. The AfD deserves credit for challenging this confusion. It has insisted that German interests are paramount and that Russia cannot be treated as a permanent enemy without serious costs to Europe. Its proposals include reducing financial and military assistance to pressure Kiev into peace negotiations, offering partial sanctions relief to encourage talks, and lifting sanctions fully once a peace agreement is reached. These are subjects for practical diplomacy. They recognize that Russia will remain a major European power whatever German ministers say about it, and that a durable settlement must be negotiated with Moscow. The AfD’s parliamentary proposal gives negotiations and the restoration of relations a place in policy that endless establishment declarations of “resolve” cannot supply.

The BSW’s opposition to arms deliveries to Ukraine and its demand for diplomacy give it substantial common ground with the AfD. This is one reason to welcome its presence in parliament. Thus, in Saxony-Anhalt, the immediate opportunity belongs to the AfD and BSW: together, they could turn their rejection of the present course into a governing coalition.

Saxony-Anhalt has now given that challenge political weight. The AfD won 43.8% and 39 seats. The CDU (Christian Democratic Union, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party) received 17.2% and 15 seats. The BSW entered parliament with 5.3% and five seats. Together, the AfD and BSW would hold 44 of the 83 seats, exceeding the 42 needed for a majority. The CDU, SPD (Social Democratic Party), Greens, and Left have only 39 between them. An alternative majority excluding the AfD would therefore require the BSW. The reported seat allocation presents the BSW with a clear choice: negotiate a change of government with the election winner or help its opponents keep it out.

The AfD fell short of an absolute majority, but has still earned the strongest political claim to lead coalition negotiations, even though it has no automatic right to govern. The establishment’s firewall exists to prevent that claim from being tested through ordinary bargaining. Before demands are presented, before compromises are considered, before a common program is examined, the answer is already supposed to be no. The establishment then describes this refusal as a “defense of democracy.” It might more honestly describe it as a defense of its own exclusive right to supply the government.

No party is legally obliged to cooperate with the AfD. Equally, no party is entitled to escape criticism for refusing. The defenders of the firewall like to recite the first point as though it settles the second. It does not. Parties make choices, and voters are entitled to judge them. If the CDU can contemplate arrangements involving the Greens and the Left (both radical, socially destructive, and truly extremist), it must explain why differences in those directions can be managed while differences with the AfD prohibit even a discussion. Saying “we will not cooperate with the AfD because of the firewall” does not explain why cooperation would be wrong.

This is the practical meaning of the uniparty. The Greens and the Left openly advance the left-liberal agenda, the SPD supports it, and the CDU helps preserve it while calling itself conservative. Their campaign quarrels offer voters the illusion of choice without a real change of direction. When the AfD threatens to overturn that agenda, they unite to keep it out of government and call their cooperation “democratic responsibility.” Ministers can be replaced and coalition partners reshuffled, but the same political course survives. The firewall protects the established parties from the consequence elections should make possible: losing power to an opposition that intends to govern differently.

The firewall lets the established parties lose voters without losing power. Instead of defeating the AfD through better government and stronger arguments, they can gather enough coalition partners to keep it out. Parties rejected at the ballot box then present their survival in office as a “victory for democracy.” This gives force to the AfD’s accusation that opposition is welcome only while it cannot govern. Every additional party recruited to keep the AfD out makes the arrangement harder to disguise: the established parties are protecting their own hold on power.

The BSW should understand this danger better than most. It was founded to challenge policies that the established parties treated as beyond debate. It deserves sympathy for reopening arguments about war, economic interests, and the costs imposed on ordinary people. Its call for normal relations with Russia offers a necessary alternative to permanent confrontation, and its willingness to defend that position under political pressure deserves credit. However, if the BSW refuses to enter into a coalition with the AfD, it accepts an establishment veto over its own political freedom. It may still speak against the system, but the established parties will have allowed the BSW to criticize their policies while preventing it from forming a government that could change them.

Supporting individual AfD proposals is better than rejecting them on principle, but it can become an excuse for avoiding the real contest over power. The BSW could claim influence through occasional votes while leaving the government and its priorities in other hands. A government in Saxony-Anhalt cannot stop Germany’s weapons deliveries to Ukraine or negotiate peace with Russia; those decisions belong to the federal government. An AfD-BSW coalition would need an agreement on matters it could directly influence, such as schools, policing, and state spending. If it governed well, it would give voters concrete evidence that cooperation between the two parties can work. That would weaken the argument for keeping the AfD out of office. The established parties would then have to defend their record against an actual AfD-led government. The firewall spares them that comparison.