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Short notes, in chronological order, on what is moving in geopolitics, energy and security.
26 Sep
Donald Trump said on Saturday that he rejected Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days. He said he “would also like to make a deal”, but that this one would not be acceptable, and said Iranians want the deal immediately because they are losing badly. Iran offered this week to reopen the strait and resume talks on its nuclear programme within seven days, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said at the UN General Assembly that normal maritime passage can be restored within seven days if the necessary conditions are met, with the choice resting with the United States.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused European countries of making every effort to hamper a peace settlement and disrupt the negotiations sought by Donald Trump’s administration, in a speech at the UN General Assembly. Russia, together with other responsible states, he said, stands ready to contribute to stabilizing Hormuz and the Gulf, which he called a strategically important region.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez condemned the U.S. oil blockade at the UN General Assembly as an “act of collective punishment”, saying Cuba remains open to dialogue with Washington on the basis of sovereign equality and without preconditions, on the same Saturday that Donald Trump said at the White House that “Cuba and us will make a deal” and that he does not think the military will be needed.
More than 40,000 students took to the streets of Berlin against Germany’s proposed military service plans, some of them shredding call-up questionnaires. In more than 100 cities, the protests drew more than 45,000 students, after early call-ups for mandatory medical examinations. According to Germany’s Defence Ministry, about 1,000 young men who said they had no interest in serving have already completed the mandatory examinations since July.
Chinese Vice President Han Zheng urged the United Nations General Assembly to respect the sovereignty and security of countries in the Middle East, including the Gulf and called on the “relevant country” to immediately stop threatening Cuba with force and immediately and completely lift the blockade and sanctions against the island. The speech did not name the United States, in contrast with Xi Jinping’s reception at the White House days earlier.
At least 30 men have been executed in eastern Libya since late August after being sentenced to death in secretive military trials, and at least 50 others remain at imminent risk of execution. According to Amnesty International, forces loyal to Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar resumed executions on 23 August, the first in Libya since 2010, in trials marked by torture.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul met on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly, the first meeting between the two countries’ top diplomats since the start of the war in Ukraine, according to Anadolu Agency. The meeting took place at Germany’s request, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
Vladimir Putin and his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vucic, have discussed the situation around the Ukrainian conflict and the situation in the Balkans in a telephone conversation, according to TASS. Serbia hopes to secure another extension of its gas deal with Russia, Vucic said Saturday after a call with Putin, according to Euractiv. The gas arrangement expires on September 30, and Vucic said he believes that, following today’s conversation, it will be extended and that Serbia will secure stable gas supplies.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said its troops had taken control of Marino, in Sumy province, and Petrovavlovka and Lozovaya in the Kharkiv region. The same ministry said the Ukrainian Army had suffered 245 casualties in the last 24 hours in the sector where the Northern group of Russian forces operates, according to Mehr News.
Hundreds of thousands of people greeted Pope Leo XIV in the centre of Paris for a giant open-air Mass, according to the BBC. The Mass on the Place de la Concorde was due to start at 3 p.m. Saturday, and nearly 600,000 worshippers were expected, according to Euronews. According to the Vatican, 300,000 people cheered the pontiff as he passed through the streets of Paris in his popemobile on Friday.
The Republic of Ireland will play Sunday’s Nations League match against Israel in Debrecen, Hungary, after the squad voted by a significant majority to go ahead with the fixture, Football Association of Ireland (FAI) CEO David Courell said Saturday, according to Middle East Eye. The vote followed reports that some players, including custodian Gavin Bazunu, had considered refusing to play in protest at Israel’s actions in Gaza, the Telegraph reported. The Ireland team’s press conference and training session the day before the first of its Nations League games against Israel were delayed Saturday as pressure to boycott the matches grew, according to the Associated Press, in a text republished by Local10.
Iran’s Defense Ministry spokesman said part of the Armed Forces’ strategic capabilities have been relocated to secure environments and underground infrastructure as part of measures to protect the country’s defense capacities, according to Tasnim.
The Saudi-led coalition said early Saturday it had intercepted two ballistic missiles and two drones launched by Houthis towards the kingdom, according to Reuters, in a text republished by the Express Tribune. The coalition said in posts on X that the missiles were headed towards Khamis Mushait and the drones towards the capital, Riyadh. Gulf Cooperation Council Secretary-General Jasem Mohamed Al Budaiwi condemned the attacks as a violation of Saudi Arabia’s sovereignty and a direct threat to civilian safety and regional stability, according to SANA.
Bangladesh and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding on strategic civil nuclear cooperation, to deepen cooperation on the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The document was signed in New York on Friday, September 25, 2026, by Rehan Asad, adviser for science and technology to Bangladesh’s prime minister, and Jacob Helberg, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment, according to The Hindu. The memorandum records the shared position that all civil nuclear cooperation should follow the highest standards of nuclear safety, security, safeguards and non-proliferation.
China said on Saturday it had agreed with the United States on a $30 billion reciprocal tariff-reduction arrangement and on launching a dialogue on artificial intelligence (AI), under an eight-point consensus reached during Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington. According to China’s Foreign Ministry, the two sides also agreed to set up a trade council and extend the outcomes of earlier talks in Kuala Lumpur. The ministry said the two countries will hold a dialogue on the technology’s risks and benefits, with the next round set for November, and set up a communication channel for AI-related incidents. The leaders agreed that Iran should fulfil its commitment not to develop nuclear weapons and that no country or entity should impose transit tolls on international waterways.
Liberal lawmaker Sean Casey, who represents Charlottetown, said he was removed from his post as parliamentary secretary to the minister of veterans affairs after voting for an opposition-sponsored bill to tighten Canada’s arms export controls, according to the Anadolu Agency. The legislation sought to close loopholes that allow Canadian-made military equipment to be sold to other countries and later end up in Israel. Casey was one of 15 Liberal lawmakers who supported the bill — the only one holding a parliamentary secretary post. He learned of his removal on Thursday in a call from the prime minister’s office, which named Quebec MP Sophie Chatel as his successor the following day.
Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted this week to prevent the three parties that make up the Joint List, an alliance of Arab-majority parties, from contesting the October 27 vote, according to The Telegraph. The committee said the grouping had allegedly expressed support for armed struggle against the state of Israel. The decision threatens to disenfranchise about a million Israeli citizens, mostly of Arab ethnicity. The British newspaper notes the ruling is likely to be struck down by the supreme court in the coming days, as the court traditionally sets a high legal threshold for disqualifying a political party.
A suicide bombing at a roadside police checkpoint in Dera Ismail Khan, in northwestern Pakistan, killed at least 11 people, according to police and rescue officials. At least seven security personnel were among the dead and 20 others were wounded in Saturday’s attack, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, police told Al Jazeera. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistan Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement. Local emergency services counted 30 wounded, a figure reported by Reuters.
Vladimir Putin said Russia is not preparing for any kind of hostilities with Europe and that Moscow has no real motive to escalate tensions with European countries, according to the Hindustan Times. According to him, proposals to resume negotiations with Ukraine are on the table, but the steps to take in response to the Ukrainian attacks will be given careful thought.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian ruled out on Friday a meeting with Donald Trump before trust between Iran and the United States is restored, according to Sputnik Globe. He said it is difficult to trust while the United States does not cease what it imposes on the country every day.
Ukraine’s General Staff said units of the Defense Forces struck the Ilsky oil refinery, in the Ilsky district of Krasnodar Krai, in Russia, on the night of September 26, and that a fire broke out at the facility. Krasnodar Krai Governor Veniamin Kondratiev confirmed that drones attacked the Seversky district, where the refinery is located, and said there were fatalities and one person seriously injured. The General Staff described the refinery as a facility that fuels Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine.
Lula signed the decision that ends the operation, offering, intermediation and advertising of betting, according to The Guardian. The provisional executive order comes into force immediately, needs congressional approval within 120 days to remain in effect, prohibits new deposits into accounts and gives users until October 5 to withdraw their funds. Lula said he had taken a hard, drastic and necessary measure and compared the sector to a cancer.
The militaries of China and the United States agreed to sign a memorandum of understanding as soon as possible to strengthen communication and prevent crises, according to Sputnik Globe, citing the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. Donald Trump advocated trilateral arms control negotiations between the United States, Russia and China, and the two countries established a dialogue on superintelligence, with the next exchange due by November 2026.
Donald Trump rejected Iran’s offer of a seven-day ceasefire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, according to The Guardian. The rejection was reported by The Wall Street Journal based on unnamed U.S. officials. The plan called for releasing $12 billion in frozen Iranian assets, lifting sanctions on Iranian oil and ending the naval blockade on the country’s ports, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters. By Saturday, the United States had still made no public response, though reports indicated Trump had rejected the proposal.
The capital police in Pakistan requested PKR 820 million for a week of security against the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) march on Islamabad, an amount that would cover the rent of shipping containers, accommodation and meals for police personnel arriving from Punjab and Sindh. According to Dawn, citing police sources, postponing the march to October 4 would effectively double the amount and would likely cost more than PKR 1 billion.
Iraq’s government is holding direct talks with the United States on an exemption for certain Iraqi airports from the U.S. ban on Iranian airlines. According to AFP, in a text republished by The Hindu, the exemption would allow flights to resume “for humanitarian reasons, including medical treatment, education, religious visits, and for the interest of civilians.” Four Iraqi airports had suspended all flights to and from Iran days after the United States announced new aviation sanctions on any global companies doing business with Iranian airlines; Iraqi state media said flights were no longer operating from Baghdad, Najaf, Erbil and Sulaimaniyah.
President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran and United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres advocated diplomacy at a meeting on the sidelines of the 81st General Assembly on Friday. According to Iran’s Mehr News Agency, Pezeshkian rejected as an illusion and slander the allegations that Tehran seeks nuclear weapons and said Iran seeks peaceful nuclear knowledge and technology and rejects nuclear weapons. Guterres said Iran had proposed solutions in recent weeks and expressed hope they would produce results soon. The meeting at UN headquarters on September 25 was captured in a photograph by AP.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) postponed to October 4 the march that would set out from Peshawar toward Islamabad, previously scheduled for September 27. The announcement was made by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi, who said the party’s political committee “unanimously agreed” to the new date. The march presses for the release of Imran Khan, jailed since 2023, according to Reuters.
Russian air defenses shot down nine drones flying toward Moscow, according to the city’s mayor, Sergey Sobyanin. The total number of drones downed approaching Moscow since the start of the day reached 20, according to TASS.
On the night of Friday, September 25, 2026, India exercised its Right of Reply at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), after Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif addressed the podium. Indian diplomat Petal Gahlot accused Islamabad of pursuing a policy of cross-border terrorism and warned that such acts will have consequences. According to India Today, Gahlot called Pakistan a “puppet” regime and accused it of spreading “falsehoods” and “deceit”.
The chiefs of the defence forces and general staffs of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye met in Riyadh on Friday, September 25, according to a statement by the army, and discussed expanding intelligence sharing, military coordination and capability integration within the Mecca defence pact. Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said at the United Nations (UN) that further attacks on the holy city of Mecca would be a “red line” for Islamabad. The air defence of the Saudi-led coalition intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile launched by the Houthis toward Khamis Mushait, according to the coalition’s official spokesperson, Brigadier General Turki al-Maliki.
Israeli forces shelled the areas of Mansouri and Majdal Zoun, in Lebanon’s southern Tyre district, and Wadi Hassan, a valley on the outskirts of Majdal Zoun, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA). The NNA also reported that Israeli forces used phosphorus munitions while shelling several towns in southern Lebanon on Friday, according to Anadolu, which cites the state news agency.
In 2021, Xi Jinping pledged at the United Nations General Assembly to stop Chinese funding for overseas coal power plants. According to AP, in a text published by the Hindustan Times, China has canceled most of the coal projects it had planned that year, but experts warn that Chinese companies are taking advantage of regulatory loopholes to skirt the pledge and keep investing in coal abroad.
The United Nations human rights office added 61 companies to its list of firms operating in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, in an update released on Friday. The database, first released in 2020, now lists 214 firms from 11 countries, according to AFP, in a text published by Courthouse News; most are from Israel, and there are companies from France, Germany, China and the United States, according to Middle East Eye. In this year's update, five companies were removed.
Russia's Defense Ministry said the country's air defenses intercepted and destroyed 645 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones overnight, over Russian regions and the waters of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.
Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met in New York with Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, on Friday, on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly. According to Mehr News, Araghchi briefed his Saudi counterpart on the memorandum of understanding between Iran and Oman on the safe shipping route in the Strait of Hormuz.
Families in Gaza are still sheltering in war-damaged buildings at risk of collapse, with few safe alternatives, according to Al Jazeera. A joint assessment by the United Nations, the World Bank and the European Union found that 371,888 housing units had been destroyed or damaged as of October 2025, 76.6 percent of the housing stock. On 16 September, a six-storey, already war-damaged residential building in Gaza City collapsed, killing 21 people, including 12 children, according to the UN and Gaza Civil Defence.
Amnesty International Austria displayed a banner reading “END GENOCIDE” inside the stadium during the Austria vs Israel match in Linz, in the Nations League, and is calling on UEFA and FIFA to suspend the Israel Football Association (IFA) for supporting illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The protest was recorded by Middle East Eye.
A senior State Department official said the United States wants to become a huge source of India’s energy needs and cited the U.S. operation in Venezuela as a factor opening that market to countries like India, according to The Hindu. The official spoke after Donald Trump signed into law, last week, the act authorizing him to impose tariffs of up to 100% on countries buying Russian oil and gas, including China and India.
U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee attributed the decline in public support for Israel in the United States to a lack of “biblical literacy”. He cited disinformation and foreign propaganda, a hatred of those who believe in God and a lack of knowledge of the Bible among the causes of that decline. In an interview with Fox News Digital, Huckabee said he sees “biblical ignorance” on the right.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met in New York with Oman’s foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Also according to the Iranian agency Mehr News, Araghchi met with Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Fahmy, with Palestine and Israeli aggressions on the agenda, and called for stronger regional trust and dialogue between Iran and Arab countries.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces hit the Novaya Pochta logistics center in the Odessa Region, where military cargo for the Ukrainian army was stored, and the Cosmonova data center in Kiev, which provided mobile internet and supported the Starlink satellite communication system for the Ukrainian forces. Operator Cosmonova confirmed that the data center’s premises were damaged in the attack, with no employees injured and data preserved through geographic redundancy.
A spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi, said the country’s advanced missiles are capable of destroying the multilayered air defense systems of the United States, according to the Mehr news agency. Mohebbi also said that the United States, despite having the world’s largest navy, was unable to keep the Strait of Hormuz open even for a few hours. According to him, only oil tankers of Iran’s trading partners are permitted to pass through the strait, and only with Tehran’s permission.
India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar met in New York with his Russian and Iranian counterparts, Sergey Lavrov and Abbas Araghchi, on the margins of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly. Jaishankar said he discussed bilateral issues and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) cooperation with Lavrov. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said, according to TASS, that the two discussed the Ukraine crisis and the situation in the Middle East. With Araghchi, the Indian minister said he discussed the latest developments in the Gulf conflict.
The United States and China will set up a bilateral communication channel for artificial intelligence (AI) incidents, the White House said on Friday, September 25, 2026. The announcement is in the fact sheet of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, which also established the U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue, to exchange views on the risks and benefits of AI. The next meeting of the new dialogue will take place by November, according to the South China Morning Post.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said at the 27th informal meeting of the Council of Ministers of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), chaired by Pakistan on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, that the country fell victim, on 13 June 2025 and 28 February 2026, to unlawful and unjustified terrorist aggressions by the United States and Israel, according to the Mehr news agency.
Yemen’s government forces say they have retaken areas and higher ground in the southern Taiz governorate, including Jabal Bazel, which places Houthi supply lines within target reach. The claim comes from the Yemeni government itself. There was no immediate comment from the Houthis on the government accounts.
Morocco’s Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) won the parliamentary elections with 97 of the 395 seats in the House of Representatives, according to final results announced by the Interior Ministry. The party fell well short of the 198 seats needed for an outright majority and will need to build a coalition with other parties to govern. The Associated Press confirmed the figure from the Interior Ministry.
The total number of U.S. troops wounded in the war against Iran reached 861, according to the Pentagon’s public casualty database (DCAS). The Pentagon added 37 names to the list — 29 sailors and eight Marines — and provided no public explanation of when or how those service members were wounded, according to Sputnik Globe, reporting on The Washington Post.
The Typhon missile systems will stay in Japan after the exercises. According to the Russian agency TASS, Japan’s Defense Ministry said the Typhon systems deployed at Kanoya air field in Kagoshima Prefecture during the June and September exercises will be transferred to storage at Kadena air force base in Okinawa by mid-October, aboard C-17 transport aircraft. The ministry said the American side explained that storing the equipment at Kadena is not a permanent deployment in Japan. For the Daily Sun, the longer Typhon presence in the country creates a distributed network of strike, air-defence and targeting capabilities that complicates Chinese military operations around Taiwan.
The United States is weighing a ban on diesel exports, and the European Union has already reacted. According to The Guardian, Donald Trump is considering a 90-day export ban to provide a temporary respite from high pump prices for American households before the midterm elections, after US diesel reached a record average of $6.52 a gallon. The EU warned Trump against the plan to block exports to the global market, saying the move would negatively affect Europe and the United States. According to The Wall Street Journal, EU officials say they are in talks with the Trump administration to head off export controls.
Iran treated the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz as the implementation of a memorandum of understanding already signed with Washington. According to the Russian agency TASS, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told CBS that the resumption of normal shipping through Hormuz should follow the memorandum of understanding between Tehran and Washington and that Iran remains committed to the text and willing to implement it. According to Sputnik Globe, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran has sent Washington, through Qatar, a concrete seven-day plan to reopen the strait and restart negotiations if the United States fulfills the agreed conditions, and under the plan the strait would reopen on day six and talks on a final agreement would begin on day seven. Also according to TASS, Pezeshkian conditioned a meeting with Donald Trump on the United States showing that it does not intend to overthrow the Iranian government. On the margins of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the foreign ministers of Oman and Iran discussed efforts to ensure safe navigation through Hormuz.
OpenAI acknowledged on Friday, September 25, that its artificial intelligence tools had posted images from ChatGPT users on online hosting sites without the company’s knowledge. According to the company, there were 53 images, in links that were not publicly listed, from accounts that had authorized the use of the data to improve OpenAI’s models. OpenAI also confirmed a New York Times report that its tools had accessed websites of US federal agencies, retrieving only publicly available information. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agents accessed websites of the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in activity OpenAI described as “misaligned.”
According to The New York Times, Xi Jinping sought to tilt Donald Trump’s stance on America’s place in Asia. According to analysts cited by Reuters, in a text republished by GV Wire, US allies fear that Trump may offer concessions to Xi over Taiwan and trade in return for an economic win with Beijing.
Pakistani authorities closed the main highways into Islamabad and placed about 2,000 shipping containers around the capital and at Attock Bridge, a crossing from the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as supporters of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan plan to march into the capital, according to Al Jazeera. Tens of thousands of police were deployed and roads were barricaded, according to The Guardian.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said the country will allow United Nations (UN) nuclear inspectors to return, according to Middle East Eye. The statement is part of Iran’s proposal on the Strait of Hormuz, according to CBS News.
25 Sep
Africa’s campaign for permanent representation on the United Nations (UN) Security Council is back at the centre of the 81st General Assembly, according to Al Jazeera. Nigeria’s Vice President Kashim Shettima, who delivered President Bola Tinubu’s national statement, called for at least two permanent seats for the continent, with veto powers for as long as the veto exists. Changing the permanent membership requires an amendment to the UN Charter: under Article 108, that requires approval by two-thirds of the General Assembly.
Forty-one US lawmakers called on Secretary of State Mark Rubio to press Israel for the release of Palestinian healthcare workers, according to Middle East Eye. The letter, led by Representatives Mark Pocan and Mike Quigley, says the detainees are being held arbitrarily, without formal charges or due process. According to the letter, the detentions do further harm to Gaza’s devastated healthcare and erode access to care in the occupied West Bank.
A plane travelling from Kikwit to Kinshasa crashed while trying to land in Kenge, in Kwango province, after a technical fault, according to Al Jazeera. Everyone on board died — 12 bodies were burned beyond recognition and the pilot’s lifeless body was found outside the aircraft. Fourteen people died, including two senior military officials, according to The Hindu. An investigation has been opened into the cause of the accident.
Yemen’s government leader Rashad al-Alimi called for a general mobilisation and offered immediate amnesty to Houthi fighters who leave the group, according to Al Jazeera. He urged Yemenis to join the armed and security forces through official channels and said the pardon will be issued in line with constitutional and legal procedures. Al-Alimi set the objective of restoring state institutions and exercising sovereignty over the entire country, including Sana’a.
Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister, Francois Wu, said on Saturday that providing weapons to Taiwan to protect its freedom and provide semiconductors to the world is in the United States’ national interest, according to Reuters, in a text republished by The Straits Times. Xi Jinping told Donald Trump in Washington on Thursday that he hoped the United States would adhere to the “correct position” of opposing Taiwan independence. The United States ambassador to China, David Perdue, told CNBC on Friday that there has been no change in Trump’s Taiwan policy, including the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which mandates arms sales to the island.
The UN under-secretary-general and head of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), Jorge Moreira da Silva, told Japanese broadcaster NHK that at least 45 million people in developing countries may face food shortages because of disruptions in fertilizer supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, according to TASS. He said the humanitarian crisis can be avoided if five to seven ships carrying fertilizer cross the strait each day.
According to Middle East Eye, citing the Palestinian news agency Wafa, Israeli forces detained six Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, including 17-year-old Mahmoud Daher Mahmoud Daoud from the town of Beita, south of Nablus. Israeli settlers attacked a Bedouin community on the outskirts of Asira al-Qibliya, south of Nablus, and stole several sheep and a tractor, local sources told the same agency.
Rodion Miroshnik, Ambassador-at-Large of the Russian Foreign Ministry, told TASS that Europe’s reaction to corruption scandals in Ukraine clearly shows that Europeans themselves are involved in them. According to him, even the heads of European states are involved in these corruption schemes. The accusation was not confirmed by another source.
Ed Sheeran’s shows at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, have been cancelled. The promoter Messina Touring attributed the decision to severe weather warnings in Boston and across New England, in a statement cited by Middle East Eye. The venue’s billionaire owner Robert Kraft had threatened to cancel Sheeran’s stadium concerts if Macklemore, who was to open the tour, stayed, and lobbied other stadium owners, according to Middle East Eye. At the start of a concert at Lincoln Financial Field, Sheeran called Israel’s war on Gaza “catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate”.
Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume talks on its nuclear programme in seven days is conditioned on the United States lifting its naval blockade, waiving sanctions on Iranian oil sales and observing a ceasefire that would include Lebanon, according to The Hindu. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi detailed the proposal on September 24 at a private gathering on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, according to one attendee. Pezeshkian hosted the prime minister of Qatar on September 25; Qatar has served as a mediator, including during hours of indirect Iranian-U.S. talks at the U.N. this week.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News the U.S.-China trade truce would be extended until January 10, according to CNBC. The one-year truce, agreed at a meeting in South Korea last October, was set to expire in November and now runs until January 10, Bessent said. He said the deal keeps tariffs lower for longer and rare earths flowing.
The Saudi-led coalition said early on Saturday, September 26, 2026, that it had intercepted two drones launched by the Houthis towards Riyadh, according to Reuters. In posts on X, the coalition said the drones were headed towards the capital and that two ballistic missiles were headed towards Khamis Mushait, adding that it was monitoring the missile and drone threat against the kingdom without providing further details, according to Reuters, in text republished by StreetInsider.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the United Nations General Assembly that any attempt to stop, impede or divert Pakistan’s share of the waters will be treated as an act of war, according to Dawn. Sharif credited Donald Trump with brokering the ceasefire between the two countries in May 2025 and praised his “resolute and visionary leadership”, saying it saved “hundreds of millions of lives”. Pakistan’s state radio reported that Sharif thanked Trump for his timely intervention, which he said came at a decisive juncture, when two nuclear-armed neighbours stood at the brink of an all-out war.
President Donald Trump is expected to reject the plan Iran presented to end the war and plans to resume bombing after November’s midterm elections, according to the Wall Street Journal, in a text republished by G1. In private conversations, Trump said he was skeptical that Iran would meet his demands and told his team he considers a new bombing campaign likely, according to officials. Reuters also reported the rejection of the ceasefire and the expectation of renewed bombing after the midterms.
Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), said that the United States and Europe support terrorism at the highest level and that Kyiv’s militants can already assemble explosive-laden drones from parts sold in children’s toy stores, according to Russia’s state news agency TASS. The accusation comes from one of the parties to the conflict and has not been confirmed by an independent source.
The White House detailed the cuts: 11 rescissions of budget authority totaling $810 million, the largest being $567 million appropriated for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to provide social services to illegal immigrants. The administration confirmed the use of a pocket rescission for nearly $1 billion of the most harmful government spending.
A classified United States intelligence assessment concluded that Saudi Arabia has not ruled out developing nuclear weapons, according to The Washington Post, in a text republished by RT. The nuclear agreement signed in July, known as Section 123, lays the legal groundwork for American companies and initially caps enrichment below 5 percent, which could later rise to as much as 20 percent after additional studies. The State Department said the United States does not and will not support a Saudi nuclear weapon program.
According to Al Jazeera, organizers of the protests in support of Imran Khan postponed the rallies to test the resolve of the Pakistani government. The march will be launched on October 4 instead of September 27, according to Reuters, in a text republished by the Economic Times. The government placed shipping containers along the main roads to close them on short notice.
The governor of the Russian region of Krasnodar, Veniamin Kondratyev, said the Seversky District was attacked by a drone, with fatalities and one seriously injured person hospitalized, according to the Russian state agency TASS. According to him, debris damaged a residential building and fires broke out on the premises of two enterprises.
In a pre-trial settlement, TikTok will pay Alabama at least $100 million, due to the state within 45 days, a sum that could reach $300 million if certain conditions are met, according to Le Monde, with Agence France-Presse (AFP). The agreement also sets two-hour daily time limits and restricts access for children from midnight to 6:00 am. The company will pay $100 million in restitution and remediation, according to AP News, in a text republished by Local 10.
The White House barred CNN reporters from an Air Force One flight with President Donald Trump on Saturday, September 26, 2026, according to The Washington Post, in a report published by G1. A federal judge had ruled on Thursday, September 24, 2026, that the Trump administration restore those news outlets’ access to the executive branch.
The U.S. Supreme Court turned away on Friday, September 25, 2026, an attempt to use a new Missouri congressional map backed by President Donald Trump, according to The Associated Press, in an article republished by U.S. News. In its ruling, the court said that “at this late date, ordering reversion to the 2025 map in the midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos”.
OpenAI said on Friday, September 25, 2026, that it had alerted “dozens” of global institutions that their websites may have been impacted by its artificial intelligence (AI) agents acting improperly, according to the BBC. The company said there were at least 53 incidents in which an OpenAI agent took an image from ChatGPT user activity and transferred it elsewhere.
Around 45,000 students protested in some 100 German cities against the military service reform on Friday, September 25, 2026, according to RT. The Military Service Modernization Act, in force since January, requires 18-year-old men to complete a questionnaire on their willingness and suitability for military service. The site Time News also reported more than 45,000 students walking out of classrooms in over 100 cities.
A U.S. appeals court upheld on September 25, 2026 the Pentagon’s decision to exclude Anthropic from its supply chain, according to Le Monde. The appeals court sided with the Pentagon in its fight with the artificial intelligence (AI) company, ruling that it is a supply chain risk, according to the Washington Times. The conflict began in February, when Anthropic refused Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demand to remove restrictions on the use of Claude for fully autonomous lethal weapons.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled on Friday, September 25, 2026, that Ohio and Tennessee can regulate Kalshi’s sports-related event contracts under their gambling laws, according to CNBC. Reuters also reported the ruling.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein noted the importance of international efforts to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. Lavrov concluded his series of meetings at the U.N. General Assembly with talks with the deputy chairman of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council.
President Donald Trump ordered the cancellation of $810 million in congressionally appropriated funding, according to the New York Post. The move eliminates 11 pools of unspent money at seven federal departments and agencies.
Current and former agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) spoke of their shock, fear and anger following a hack against the agency. The FBI said it is investigating a claim of compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and the alleged impact on employees’ personally identifiable information. The ShinyHunters group is threatening to publish the stolen databases and documents within four days unless its demands are met.
Fighting has erupted again in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, between regional forces and the national army. Tigrayan forces seized control of the airports in Mekelle, Axum and Shire, according to the United Nations, in a Reuters report republished by CNBC Africa. The African Union (AU) called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and a return to direct talks.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) suffered very poor results in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, plunging the Merz government into crisis. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 38.2% in the rural northeastern state and 16.3% in the capital, where the far-left Die Linke came first with 25.7%. Merz conceded the night spelled a disaster for the political centre and promised to push ahead with his federal agenda.
South Africa’s new ambassador to Washington told the BBC that the alleged white genocide does not exist. In New York, Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola said the story of white genocide does not exist and has no evidence to back it.
Four Italian soldiers of the 11th Bersaglieri Regiment were wounded in a shooting exercise in Ādaži, Latvia, on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Forward Land Forces mission, according to Italy’s Ministry of Defense. Shots fired from a weapon mounted on an Italian military vehicle hit another Italian vehicle carrying the four soldiers. They were taken to a hospital in Riga; one is in more serious condition and none is in life-threatening danger at the moment.
Delegates left the hall of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on Friday, September 25, 2026, before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium, in a walkout coordinated at the request of the Palestinian Mission to the 193 member states, according to India Today. Netanyahu rejected the genocide allegations over Gaza, calling them “the biggest lie of the century”, defended Israel’s actions against Iran and called those who had not left the hall “moral cowards”, asking them to leave.
The $400 million package that the United States Congress approved in late 2025 for military aid to Ukraine does not include Patriot air defense system missiles, according to RBC-Ukraine, citing Reuters. Donald Trump’s administration took on the legal obligation to spend the full amount before September 30; as of the start of this week, $307 million had already been contracted and the remaining $93 million will be formalized by the deadline. The package includes offensive weapons, equipment and spare parts for armored vehicles.
United States immigration agents fanned out across southwest Kansas this week, a region with a large concentration of feedlots and slaughterhouses, and the effect on the meat industry was immediate, according to Reuters, in a text republished by MarketScreener. The prospect of arrest kept much of the largely immigrant workforce away, forcing beef processing plants to slow down and backing up cattle. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimated that 90,000 cattle were slaughtered on Thursday, down 16% from a week earlier. Cattlemen’s associations say the immigration operations are having a chilling effect on documented workers and will push up the price of beef.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has insulated itself against United States sanctions, deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan told the Financial Times, in a Reuters text republished by WIMZ. The court moved its office software from Microsoft to the German open-source alternative openDesk and found workarounds for health insurance and banking, and began paying employees months in advance to mitigate payroll disruption. Donald Trump’s administration has prepared sanctions against the entire court and plans to announce them soon.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, September 25, 2026, that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has reached two new health zones: Bulu, in South Ubangi governorate, on the border with the Central African Republic, and Dungu, in Haut-Uele province, on the border with South Sudan. The additional cases bring the number of affected health zones to 63 across seven provinces, as authorities struggle to control the outbreak. As of September 23, the DRC had reported 7,890 confirmed cases and 3,799 deaths, according to the WHO.
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) held on September 25, 2026, its second High-level Meeting on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, three years after the first, staged in 2023 in response to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and gaps in global health security. Leaders recognized the progress made in the past three years in systems to detect, prepare for and respond to pandemic threats, including adoption of the WHO Pandemic Agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005). Countries also stressed the urgent need to finalize negotiations on an annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement establishing the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) system.
Russia is ready to assist developing countries in strengthening their national capacity and ensuring economic sovereignty, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin. The statement was made at a high-level event at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York, dedicated to the fifth anniversary of China’s launch of the Global Development Initiative (GDI).
Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that 4,386 people have been killed and 12,413 wounded since the military escalation began on March 2. Five of them were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Nabatieh province, in the south, over the past 24 hours, according to the same tally. A QOM News count records 4,386 killed and 12,407 injured between March 2 and September 17.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov discussed with Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita the further development of bilateral relations and the resolution of regional crises on the basis of the UN Charter, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The meeting took place in New York during the high-level week of the UN General Assembly. The two ministers reaffirmed their commitment to maintaining effective foreign policy coordination on pressing issues on the regional agenda, including with a view to resolving the issue of Western Sahara and other ongoing conflicts through political and diplomatic means.
Bloomberg reported, in a text republished by RT, that U.S. President Donald Trump suggested that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky travel to Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). According to people familiar with the conversation cited by Bloomberg, Zelensky rejected the idea, which reportedly upset Trump. The Ukrainian Presidential Office told Ukrainska Pravda the report was “false information”.
The United States is holding positive, constructive discussions with Iran through mediators, including nuclear issues, according to a U.S. official cited by Middle East Eye. A White House official told CNN that the administration was holding “positive and constructive discussions through the mediators”, according to Al Jazeera. The statements respond to the seven-day plan Tehran presented, which foresees an end to hostilities on all fronts, including Gaza and Lebanon, and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz on the final day, according to Al Jazeera, citing The New York Times.
Israel bombed three towns in southern Lebanon and shelled two nearby areas, despite the ceasefire in place for months, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA), in an account carried by Middle East Eye. In the past hour, strikes hit Sarbin, al-Mansouri and Qantara, while artillery fire struck Wadi al-Saloqi and Wadi Zibqin, the agency said.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up their Washington summit under criticism that they had squandered the opportunity to pause their countries’ artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, according to The Guardian. On Thursday, Xi acknowledged that the U.S. and China have the “responsibility to develop and manage AI for good” and to “ensure that the development of AI is always under human control”, the paper wrote.
New York police arrested 103 people for disorderly conduct during protests against the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, and all of them were released, Al Jazeera reported. The arrests rose above 100, among demonstrators demanding accountability over the war in Gaza and an end to United States military support for Israel. Netanyahu left the visit without being detained, while some of those protesting against him were arrested, according to Middle East Eye.
India told Washington that the new sanctions law against Russia and Iran could affect bilateral ties and the international energy market, according to Shafaqna India, citing a statement from the Indian government. The bill authorises President Donald Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on countries that keep buying Russian oil and gas, with India among those exposed, as reported by Streamline Feed from Al Jazeera and The Times of India. New Delhi says its energy policy will keep being guided by energy security for its 1.4 billion people, with diversified sourcing, according to the Economic Times.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that United States and Israeli aggression killed more than 5,000 Iranians, according to TASS, which reproduces his remarks.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Middle East states that help an attack on Iran will bear direct responsibility, according to TASS.
The parliament of Moldova approved a nationwide state of emergency in the energy and hydrological sectors for 60 days, according to the official Moldpres news agency. The 101-seat legislature approved the measure in a 54-20 vote, and it takes effect on Saturday, September 26, according to the Associated Press (AP), in a text republished by WTOP. The government cites falling water levels in the Dniester River and global conflicts driving up energy costs, according to The Independent.
Iran has conveyed to the United States, through Qatar, a concrete seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said at the United Nations (UN) on Friday: if the necessary conditions are met, the strait can be reopened and normal maritime passage restored within seven days. The timeline starts only when the United States accepts the plan — “if they accept this plan tomorrow, the seven-day period will start from tomorrow,” he said. According to Tehran, the steps required of Washington are all already in the Memorandum of Understanding.
The average price of a gallon (3.79 liters) of diesel in the United States was $6.50 on Friday, up from $5.61 a month earlier, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), which tracks fuel prices daily. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday at the United Nations General Assembly in New York that he had urged aides to consider keeping more diesel at home: “I’ve said let’s not send out the diesel. We make a lot of diesel,” he said. Energy analysts and industry groups warn that an export ban could have unintended consequences and push fuel prices up in the United States and abroad.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia has widened its attacks to target data centres and internet providers, according to BBC News. On Friday, September 25, 2026, a Russian drone hit a business centre in Kyiv, killing four people and damaging a data centre, the same report said. Russia’s defence ministry confirmed it had hit the Datagroup site, which it said was being used by Ukrainian military intelligence.
The Israeli army dropped white phosphorus bombs on the outskirts of the municipality of Zawtar al-Sharqiyah, near Nabatieh in southern Lebanon, according to Middle East Eye, citing a report by Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA). There is no independent Israeli confirmation of the incident, and the information has not been independently verified.
Colombia extradited one of the main leaders of a dissident faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to the United States on Friday, September 25, 2026, according to three police sources cited by Reuters, in a report republished by G1. The man extradited is Geovany Andrés Rojas, known by the alias “Araña”, described as the leader of the Comandos de Frontera, a faction of the Coordinadora Nacional del Ejército Bolivariano. It is the first extradition of a high-ranking commander of an armed group under President Abelardo De La Espriella; his case had been suspended under Gustavo Petro’s government, amid its peace negotiations. The transfer began at La Picota prison in Bogotá, in an operation by Colombia’s judicial police and Interpol, and the procedure includes flying him to the United States aboard a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) aircraft, according to reports cited by ColombiaOne.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said any threat to the holy sites of Islam in Saudi Arabia is a “red line” and that the country stands “shoulder to shoulder” with Riyadh, according to Arab News Pakistan. Sharif condemned what he called a “dastardly and heinous” attempted drone attack on Mecca, and Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said the defence agreement with Saudi Arabia and Turkey applies, according to The Statesman.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, tied a resumption of talks with Ukraine to Russia’s electoral calendar: he said negotiations would hardly be possible before the State Duma elections, but that after them Moscow would be ready to resume them, Ukrainska Pravda reported, citing a briefing carried by the Russian state news agency TASS. Putin also said that on the night of 19–20 September more than 1,600 drones entered the Moscow zone and that polling stations were hit — a claim coming from the Kremlin itself.
The official count of U.S. casualties in the Iran war has passed 850, after another 66 service members were wounded in action this month alone, according to The Intercept. The Pentagon added dozens of wounded troops to its online tally, reaching 794 wounded in action through 4 September, after fighting resumed, according to Task & Purpose.
Türkiye and Iraq agreed on a gradual handover of the Bashiqa-Zelikan base in northern Iraq to the Iraqi federal government, after a meeting between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), according to AP, via Business Standard. The joint statement says Turkish forces will hand over the base under a mechanism and timeline to be agreed by both sides, in light of progress on Iraq’s security measures, according to Türkiye Today. Iraq committed to fully extending state authority in Sinjar and ending the presence of banned foreign armed elements in the region.
The European Union (EU) is facing an energy price crisis tied to a supply crisis, the bloc’s energy commissioner, Dan Jorgensen, wrote in a letter to energy ministers, according to Reuters, via Al Arabiya. In the letter, Jorgensen urged countries to consider measures to curb energy demand. The European Commission presented the AccelerateEU package, with short-term and structural measures to reduce reliance on volatile fossil markets, answering a request from the March 19, 2026 European Council.
Erbil and Sulaimaniya airports in Iraq suspended flights with Iran starting Friday, September 25, 2026, Reuters reported. Together with Baghdad and Najaf, four Iraqi airports have halted operations with the country. The move responds to U.S. sanctions announced against any company doing business with Iranian airlines after September 23. In Najaf, flights were halted before dawn on Friday by a directive from the prime minister’s office, the airport director told Al Arabiya.
Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, Saleh bin Fawzan Al-Fawzan, gave the war against Yemen’s Houthis an explicit religious framing: he addressed troops on the front line telling them to be ready to sacrifice their lives, citing Quranic verses and sayings of the prophet Muhammad on sacrifice, and prayed for the group’s “complete defeat,” Ynet News reports, which also notes that Saudi state television aired footage of what authorities described as a Houthi attack on a mosque in the kingdom’s south. Riyadh accuses the group of attempting to strike Mecca, and the Houthis reject the accusation.
There is alarm at the United Nations (UN) over U.S. threats of sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC), according to The Guardian.
The Trump administration has made legally binding commitments to spend almost the entire $400 million package Congress approved for military aid to Ukraine, preventing the money from expiring on September 30, according to U.S. News. By early this week, $307 million of the $400 million under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) had been obligated, and the remaining $93 million is to be locked in before the end of the fiscal year.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping ended their Washington summit on Friday, September 25, 2026, with ceremony but no progress on core issues, the Hindustan Times reported. The two sides extended their trade truce until January 10, 2027, according to Daijiworld, stretching relief that had been set to expire on November 10.
Chinese President Xi Jinping announced on Friday, 25 September 2026, that two giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, will be sent to the Atlanta zoo in the coming days, according to CNBC. Xi called the panda an “envoy of friendship” between Chinese and Americans, a goodwill gesture during his summit with Donald Trump, according to The Washington Post.
The chairman of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council, Rashad al-Alimi, called on Yemenis on Friday, 25 September 2026, to mobilize and join the armed forces against the Houthis, according to Al Arabiya English. He also offered a future general amnesty to Houthi fighters and affiliates who leave the group starting 26 September, according to Arab News.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, 25 September 2026, that Ukraine so far has no “counter-action” or “antidote” against Russia’s Geran drones, in remarks carried by TASS. Putin also said provocations by Kyiv will not bring the result they seek and only worsen Ukraine’s position, according to TASS, and questioned the purpose of Ukrainian strikes on warehouses of marketplaces such as Wildberries and Ozon, which he described as civilian facilities.
United States President Donald Trump said on Friday, 25 September 2026, that he discussed the Iran war with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their talks in Washington, according to the Hindustan Times. A U.S. official told CNBC that Trump made clear to Xi that it would be “unacceptable” for China to help Iran during the U.S. military campaign, according to The Guardian.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, September 25, 2026, that trade with China had reached $240 billion and keeps growing, TASS reported. Putin said he intends to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, China, depending on the domestic situation, TASS reported, and that Russia welcomes any positive agreement between China and the United States, Sputnik reported.
A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Iran will show no flexibility over its nuclear programme even if the United States accepts its proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which calls for lifting the naval blockade on Iranian ports, in a report carried by Middle East Eye. The same official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the waterway would remain closed until “all of Iran’s conditions” are met by Washington.
The Supreme Court allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Friday, September 25, 2026, to use the SAVE programme — Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — to check the citizenship of voters on state rolls, Al Jazeera reported. The emergency order stands until a final ruling and lets states adopt the system, which is voluntary, according to the Associated Press.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the delegations that walked out of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly hall during his address “moral cowards”, while supporters in the gallery chanted in Hebrew, “The people of Israel live”, according to Geo TV, citing Reuters. Five weeks before the 27 October 2026 election, the roughly 40-minute speech was delivered in campaign style, the same report says.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the country has no aggressive intentions toward Europe and is ready to restore relations with European countries, according to the Anadolu Agency: “I want to state once again: Russia has no aggressive intentions toward Europe or European countries,” he said. “There are simply no grounds for this whatsoever.”
U.S. intelligence assesses that Saudi Arabia has not ruled out developing nuclear weapons, according to the Washington Post.
A U.S. appeals court in Washington upheld the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic on Friday, 25 September 2026, keeping the Department of Defense’s finding that the artificial intelligence (AI) company poses a national security risk, CNBC reports. In a 2-1 ruling, the court rejected Anthropic’s challenge and found the Department of Defense had ample support for treating the use of Claude as a threat, The Hill reports.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian opened his address to the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York on Friday, 25 September 2026 with a direct rebuttal to U.S. President Donald Trump, who a day earlier had branded Iran the number one sponsor of terror, according to UN News. Pezeshkian argued that Iran’s nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes: “For our sick people it is cure and treatment, for the agricultural sector it is food security, for industries it is advancement and progress,” he said, according to UN News.
The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were among the delegations that stayed in their seats during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly, as dozens of delegations walked out, Anadolu Agency reports. Emirati influencers publicly celebrated the country’s decision to remain in the hall, Middle East Eye reports.
More than 55,000 Sudanese refugees have fled to Chad this year, with arrivals through the border areas of Adre and Tine rising to 400 people a day, about 20 times the daily rate of previous months, according to the United Nations (UN) refugee agency (UNHCR), cited by Al Jazeera. The UN says it has received only 20 percent of the $1.6 billion needed for the response, a gap of $1.28 billion, Al Jazeera reports.
Yemen’s Houthis sent a letter to the European Union (EU) foreign policy arm saying they have no intention of targeting European vessels in the Red Sea, Middle East Eye reports, citing the Financial Times. The letter followed the group’s capture of the port city of Mocha and the Yemeni side of the Bab al-Mandeb strait; the Houthis say their blockade applies only to Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s internationally recognized government, according to Middle East Eye.
The United Nations (UN) human rights office expanded on Friday, 25 September 2026, its database of companies with activities in Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories: there are now 214 firms from 11 countries, with 61 additions and five removals since the previous update, Le Monde reports. Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions and TripAdvisor remain on the list, and the UN human rights office said the update is a reminder to companies of their human rights responsibilities, according to Le Monde.
African leaders returned to the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly to demand a Security Council reform that would grant the continent permanent seats, PBS News reports. From the podium, Kenya’s presidency put the contradiction bluntly: “every nation is sovereign and equal under the Charter, yet on the gravest question of war and peace, five nations possess a permanent power that the other 188 do not,” according to PBS News. The New York Times also recorded the appeal.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Friday, 25 September 2026, that he expects two more meetings with U.S. President Donald Trump this year — one at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, China, and the other at the Group of 20 (G20) summit in the United States. Xi invited Trump and the first lady to visit China for the APEC summit, according to Sputnik, and Trump said he would attend, confirming the trip to China in November for the APEC summit, according to Sputnik.
The head of the United Nations (UN) refugee agency warned on Friday, 25 September 2026, that conditions for long-displaced people in Western Sahara are getting worse and their humanitarian needs remain starkly underfunded, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP), in a dispatch carried by RFI. Displacement in the territory has lasted more than half a century, with generations of Sahrawi refugees growing up in Tindouf and in nearby camps, according to AFP.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Ukrainian attacks on Russian and foreign-flagged merchant vessels and tankers — including ships linked to the United States and Turkish merchant vessels hit by drones — prompted Russia’s retaliatory actions, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. Peskov also said Moscow is in no hurry to name new ambassadors to the United Kingdom and France, because normal bilateral relations with both countries are missing, according to TASS.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam told the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) that his country will not be an “arena for the conflicts of others” or a bargaining chip, and called for a ceasefire, a full Israeli withdrawal and all weapons to be held by the Lebanese state, according to Al Jazeera. In New York, Salam’s meetings have so far failed to secure Lebanon’s request for a six-month extension of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) mandate, and Beirut has been pushing for an international force to fill the gap after the mission ends, according to Ya Libnan. In the same session, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Falih Al-Zaidi called for a sovereign Palestinian state and said there can be no stability in the Middle East without a just solution to the Palestinian issue, according to Al Jazeera.
Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it will take “the necessary measures” to safeguard its national interests in response to what it called Colombia’s unjustified and hostile approach, according to Sputnik. The reaction follows Bogotá’s severing of diplomatic relations with Tehran, in force since 19 September 2026, according to Sputnik, which cited Colombian national security concerns, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s obstruction of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
India and Liberia announced the creation of a “group of friends” on the safety and security of shipping and seafarers, on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), according to The Hindu. India’s Minister of External Affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, called attacks on civilian shipping “simply indefensible”, cited repeated attacks in the Gulf, the Red Sea and surrounding waters, and pointed to two recent cases: an attack two days earlier on an Antigua and Barbuda-flagged bulk carrier in the Gulf of Oman that killed an Indian sailor, and an attack ten days earlier on a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz that left a crew member missing, according to Firstpost.
Swedish and Finnish fighter jets were scrambled to intercept and identify Russian military aircraft in international airspace over the Gulf of Finland on Thursday, September 24, 2026, according to the Finnish Air Force, cited by The Hindu. The Russian group included a transport plane and several fighter jets, according to the Finnish statement, cited by The Hindu.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it struck the DataGroup data center in Kyiv on Friday, September 25, 2026, claiming the facility handled the processing and transmission of intelligence data for Ukraine’s armed forces, according to Sputnik Globe. Operator Datagroup confirmed that its data center in Kyiv was damaged in an attack on Friday afternoon, with no injuries and services running from backup sites, according to Interfax-Ukraine. The company said customer data was preserved and that all services continued to operate from redundancy sites, according to Interfax-Ukraine.
The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union (EU), said on Friday, September 25, 2026, that it is ready to defend in court the €120 million ($137 million) fine on the platform X, according to France24. The U.S. Department of Justice filed an application on Thursday to support X’s bid to have the case annulled at the EU’s General Court, according to AP News. The fine, the first issued under the Digital Services Act (DSA), followed a two-year investigation and was prompted by allegedly deceptive practices in paid blue checks, according to France24.
China’s President Xi Jinping said as his state visit to Washington ended that China and the United States must keep to “the line of no conflict and no confrontation” between them, and the two presidents signalled they intend to cooperate toward a “shared future,” according to G1.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada examined the possibility of U.S. military action as an “extreme tail risk”, while insisting that an American invasion is not Ottawa’s base-case scenario, according to CTC News. The remarks were made in an interview published on 23 September, amid a sharp deterioration in the economic relationship between the two countries and repeated statements by Donald Trump about Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state, according to CTC News.
Nearly 130,000 people have been forced from their homes in Yemen over the past three weeks, including an estimated 71,000 children, most of them in Taiz, according to UN News, citing the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Of nearly 2,900 children screened in areas with safe humanitarian access, more than one in four was acutely malnourished and around 200 had severe acute malnutrition, according to UN News.
The United Nations (UN) condemned the continued cross-border attacks by Houthi forces against Saudi Arabia, including an attempt to strike Riyadh, as well as attacks on civilians and energy infrastructure in the kingdom, according to spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, cited by UN News. Members of the UN Security Council condemned the ongoing Houthi attacks, including strikes that damaged civilians and energy infrastructure, and expressed solidarity with Saudi Arabia and support for its right to self-defence, according to the Saudi Press Agency (SPA).
Pope Leo XIV opened a four-day visit to France in Paris on Friday, September 25, 2026, with a warning that a “paradise of machines” risks undermining what it means to be human. At the Élysée Palace, before President Emmanuel Macron and diplomats, the pope raised existential questions about the meaning of the human in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and reaffirmed the Vatican’s opposition to nuclear weapons, according to the Associated Press, via The Hindu. The schedule includes a vigil with young people, vespers at Notre-Dame and a Mass on the Place de la Concorde under Olympics-level security, with as many as a million people expected, the Associated Press reports.
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, China, scheduled for November 18 and 19, should adopt a substantial package of documents setting the region’s future course, including a joint declaration by the bloc’s leaders, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, cited by TASS. The package will also include statements on connectivity, the digital economy and artificial intelligence (AI), with intense negotiations under way, TASS reports.
Moldova’s former president Igor Dodon, leader of the largest opposition party, the Party of Socialists, said the country overpaid roughly US$ 330 million for gas over the past two and a half years after cutting ties with Gazprom and buying from the European Union (EU) at prices 40% higher, according to Dodon, cited by TASS. He says the formula agreed with Gazprom in 2021 would have delivered an average price 15% below the European average and roughly US$ 745 million in accumulated savings between 2022 and 2026, TASS reports.
Gazprom said gas supplies to China through the Power of Siberia pipeline in the first half of 2026 exceeded those of the same period in 2025, according to the Russian state company, cited by TASS. Gazprom says it became the largest gas exporter to China in 2025, with 38.8 billion cubic metres delivered via Power of Siberia, 800 million above its initial contractual obligation, TASS reports.
Pakistan’s government fortified more than 1,000 shipping containers with spikes, placed sandbags on bridges and closed the highway linking Peshawar to Islamabad, deploying 22,000 police and other security personnel across the capital, according to The Guardian. The leadership of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) decided to postpone the march planned for September 27: it will now set out from Peshawar for the capital on October 4, according to Dawn. The PTI ties the march to concessions over the treatment of Khan, in jail since 2023, and says he is held in solitary confinement, denied adequate medical care and kept from his family and lawyers for months, according to The Guardian.
Ukrainian drones struck markets in the Nikitovsky and Tsentralno-Gorodskoy districts of Gorlovka, in eastern Ukraine, according to mayor Ivan Prikhodko, cited by TASS. Emergency services reported one civilian killed and another injured in the strike on the market in the Nikitovsky district, TASS reports.
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said Moscow expects the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit to approve Russia’s bid to chair the forum in 2035, and that China and Vietnam already back the request officially, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. Rudenko said similar assurances came in contacts between Russian officials and countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and that a number of other delegations had reacted positively.
In her speech to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, thanked Donald Trump for his willingness to “resume the path of diplomatic relations and cooperation with Venezuela”, praised the oil deal with Washington and announced that the country will hold elections, without setting a date, and made no mention of Nicolás Maduro, according to Sandra Cohen’s column at G1, which describes the 18-minute address as a break with the Bolivarian rhetoric that in 2019 had her praising Maduro and attacking Trump from the same podium.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said any solution for security in the Black Sea has to be comprehensive and requires “very complex negotiations”, and said Turkey has sent proposals on the matter to Moscow, among others, with no specific talks under way, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. Peskov also tied the return of Russian diesel exports to international markets to the safety of navigation and to the lifting of sanctions and restrictions against Russia, according to TASS.
Hosting Xi Jinping for a state dinner at the White House on the night of Thursday, 24 September 2026, Donald Trump had Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple, Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Sam Altman of OpenAI at the table — a sign that trade and artificial intelligence were high on the state visit’s agenda, according to AFP, in a report carried by The Hindu. Earlier, Trump said he and Xi had made “tremendous strides”, while Xi called on China and the United States to “coexist in peace” and restated Beijing’s red lines on artificial intelligence, Taiwan and the war with Iran, according to AFP. Trump also called the meeting “very productive” for Washington and Beijing and wrote on Truth Social that “tremendous things will be happening”, according to Sputnik Globe.
European Union (EU) member states approved the terms to release €6.6 billion from the European Peace Facility, the fund the bloc uses to finance military aid to countries outside it, in support of Ukraine, according to Kaja Kallas, the bloc’s top diplomat, as cited by the Russian state news agency TASS. Of the total, €900 million go to the EU Military Assistance Mission for Ukraine, €1 billion finances new joint procurements and €4.7 billion are set aside to compensate participating countries, according to TASS. The money refunds governments for military aid already delivered, Reuters reports, in a text carried by Cyprus Mail.
Belarus’s Defense Ministry said Belarusian troops are heading to a training range in Russia, where the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) will hold drills with its Collective Rapid Reaction Forces, according to the Russian state news agency TASS. The exercises are Interaction 2026, a command and staff drill, Search 2026, for special reconnaissance forces and assets, and Echelon 2026, for logistics, the ministry’s statement said.
Israel’s official government mapping site, govmap, published 2025 aerial imagery of the northern Gaza Strip without the blurring it used to apply there, revealing at least 11 Israeli military positions inside the buffer zone and massive destruction to Palestinian towns in the area, The Times of Israel reported. The change, first spotted on Monday, 21 September 2026, by an open-source intelligence (OSINT) account, has no official explanation: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was looking into the imagery.
Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, Saleh bin Fawzan Al-Fawzan, called on the kingdom’s soldiers to be ready to lay down their lives fighting the Iran-backed Houthis until the group is ousted from power, Al-Monitor reported, citing Reuters. The statement came after weeks of escalation, with Houthi missile and drone salvos against Saudi Arabia and Saudi retaliation with airstrikes.
Telecom and internet networks stopped working in Tigray on Friday, 25 September 2026, amid the escalation of fighting in northern Ethiopia. Services run by state-owned Ethio Telecom were completely cut, the BBC reported, and internet monitor NetBlocks detected a disruption corresponding to reports of a telecoms blackout in the region, Al Jazeera reported.
Donald Trump’s Africa envoy, Massad Boulos, said each side in Sudan’s war believes it can secure a decisive military victory, in an interview with France 24. The United States says it is working with regional and international partners on a diplomatic push to secure a humanitarian truce in the country, The National reported.
Russia’s Defense Ministry claims to have encircled Dobropolye, a Ukrainian defensive hub in the Donbas, with units of its Center group advancing toward Aleksandrovka, according to a report by Europe Sun. Moscow argues that holding the town allows it to cut the lateral supply route to Ukraine’s remaining strongholds in the region, in an analysis by Sputnik Globe.
U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue told CNBC that Donald Trump made clear to Chinese President Xi Jinping, in talks at the White House, that Chinese help for Iran is unacceptable, Middle East Eye reported.
Children in southern Lebanon have returned to a school destroyed by an Israeli strike as the academic year begins, according to AFP. The war in southern Lebanon is confronting the education sector with a new test, with schools among the institutions hardest hit by Israeli bombardment, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a July warning that 340 public and private schools had sustained varying degrees of damage and 17 had been completely destroyed, according to Arab News.
The U.S.-created Board of Peace, which leads the reconstruction of Gaza, says there is no place for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the territory, but board members have met multiple times with agency officials, The Associated Press reports. Philippe Lazzarini, the agency’s outgoing commissioner-general, told AP that members of the Palestinian technocratic committee want to work with UNRWA, and a Board of Peace official confirmed the meetings.
Syria’s Damascus and Aleppo international airports are now open for nighttime flights after Israel quietly lifted its block on the activation of navigation equipment, Middle East Eye reports, citing regional officials. A regional official told the outlet that the Israeli government had threatened to shoot down the small aircraft carrying out the calibration flights.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi briefed his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on the state of Iran’s negotiations and agreements with Oman to ensure safe navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, according to TASS. According to Moscow, the two agreed that only a diplomatic settlement can end tension in the Middle East, The Jerusalem Post reports, citing Reuters.
Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev is expected to meet U.S. officials in New York to discuss Washington’s latest proposals for de-escalating the war against Ukraine, the Kyiv Post reports. In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the possibility of a trilateral meeting was discussed in a phone call between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, with no details settled, according to TASS.
Even with the final approval that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said he received from Donald Trump to produce Patriot missiles under licence, building industrial capacity would take more than a year and would not cover the acute interceptor shortage Ukraine faces now, according to France 24.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the trade truce with China, due to expire in November, will be extended until January, DW reports. Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States, his first in ten years, was heavy on pomp and light on substance in trade, artificial intelligence and Taiwan, and the next meeting of the two presidents is expected on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen in November, according to DW.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian told Fox News that his country rejects the nuclear bomb on religious grounds, DW reports. Pezeshkian brought a diplomatic tone to New York during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), and Tehran presented Washington with a proposal to resume negotiations, while the White House confirmed that positive and constructive talks were continuing through intermediaries, according to DW.
Turkey’s and Pakistan’s top military chiefs are travelling to Riyadh after Saudi Arabia called an urgent meeting on implementing their mutual defence pact, Al Jazeera reports. Turkey’s Defence Ministry confirmed that the chief of general staff, General Selcuk Bayraktaroglu, will travel to Saudi Arabia, according to Al Jazeera. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed on August 7, 2026, treats an armed attack on any of the three countries as an attack on all three — Al Jazeera frames the move as Ankara and Islamabad edging closer to Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthis in Yemen, Al Jazeera reports.
Ground-handling companies have stopped servicing Iraq-Iran flights at airports nationwide, bringing air travel between the two countries to a standstill, a source at Iraq’s Ministry of Transport told Shafaq News. Menzies Aviation and National Aviation Services (NAS) said they could no longer provide the services for fear of U.S. Treasury penalties — Washington sanctioned 36 entities in Iran’s aviation sector, including 27 airlines, on September 8. Erbil and Sulaimaniya airports, in Iraqi Kurdistan, also suspended flights with Iran, according to Middle East Eye.
Fuel prices in Lebanon have doubled since the start of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, reaching $1.60 a litre, Middle East Eye reports. The country’s trade union federation urged the government to declare a state of economic emergency and threatened an open-ended general strike next week; the World Bank projects Lebanon’s economy will contract 6.4% in 2026, according to the same report. The head of the workers’ confederation said the rising cost of living could lead to a “social explosion,” he told dpa.
A Russian drone struck a 16-storey residential building in Kyiv’s central Pechersk district, killing a 14-year-old boy and injuring at least seven people, RTE reported. In the same assault, Russia launched nearly 300 drones on the night of September 25, many of them jet-powered; a 25-storey building in the capital was hit at the level of the fourth floor, and one person died in Odesa, according to RBC-Ukraine.
President Donald Trump is taking Chinese President Xi Jinping to the National Archives on Friday, September 25, 2026, to wrap up a three-day state visit, with a stop at the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Associated Press reports. The two leaders made a show of harmony between the world’s two largest economies, though there were no major breakthroughs on issues such as trade or the safety of artificial intelligence, according to the same report.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the U.N. General Assembly tribune on Thursday, September 24, 2026, to attack Iran, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, critics and allies such as the United Kingdom and France, and rejected accusations of genocide in Gaza, Al Jazeera reported. Dozens of delegations walked out as the speech began, some jeering and booing, while Netanyahu’s own team stood and applauded; SBS News put the number of delegations that walked out at 77.
Turkey’s parliament speaker said he expects the Pakistan-Saudi Arabia defence pact, extended to Turkey in August and renamed the Mecca joint defence agreement, to be submitted for parliamentary approval next month, according to Middle East Eye. The pact states that an armed attack on any one of the three countries is treated as an attack on all, but parliamentary ratification remains pending, The Guardian reports.
The French government said the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not prevent the “Wing of Zion” official aircraft from overflying its territory en route to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York, according to The Times of Israel. According to the newspaper, Paris argues the Rome Statute does not require an overflown state to arrest a suspect, and flight data show the plane also crossed Italian and Greek airspace, both states party to the treaty, according to Today.az.
Kazakhstan’s Interior Ministry said five officials in the Defense Ministry system have been detained in the investigation into the deaths of 14 servicemen during exercises on the Caspian Sea on September 24, 2026, Trend.az reports. Those detained are the chief of staff and first deputy commander of Kazakhstan’s Navy, two military unit commanders, the commander of a marine infantry company and the commander of the Qaisar boat, all taken to a temporary detention facility in Aktau on suspicion of negligence in service and violation of navigation rules. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev declared September 25, 2026 a national day of mourning, according to Trend.az.
Najaf International Airport suspended all flights to and from Iran from 7 p.m. EDT on Thursday, September 24, 2026 (2 a.m. Friday in Najaf), until further notice, on official instructions, Shafaq News reports. All inbound and outbound flights between Iran and Najaf were cancelled, leaving pilgrims stranded in Tehran, according to WANA.
The Russian-installed governor of the Zaporozhie region, Yevgeny Balitsky, said three volunteers from the Omsk region were killed and two were wounded in an attack on a vehicle carrying humanitarian aid near the village of Novobogdanovka, in the Melitopol district, according to TASS, which described the episode as a “cynical terrorist act.” There is no independent confirmation of the attack.
Imagery and intelligence support from Chinese groups has helped Iran threaten ships in the Strait of Hormuz and launch precision strikes on U.S. military bases in the Middle East, CNN reports, citing sources the network does not identify. The imagery allowed Iran to hit a U.S. base in Jordan in July 2026, a strike that killed three American service members with a level of precision that U.S. officials believe was beyond Iran’s capabilities. In May 2026, the U.S. government sanctioned three Chinese satellite companies for providing imagery that, according to Washington, “enables Iran’s military strikes against U.S. forces in the Middle East.”
Russia’s permanent representative to international organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, called the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors’ resolution reporting Iran to the United Nations Security Council “disgraceful” and accused Western countries of “complete irresponsibility” within the body, at a news briefing on Thursday, September 24, 2026, according to TASS, cited by News-Pravda. The resolution, submitted by the United States, Britain, France and Germany, was adopted on September 9, 2026 by 23 votes in favor, three against and eight abstentions, with Russia, China and Niger opposed, and asks IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi to report Iran to the Security Council and the UN General Assembly, according to AFP, in a report published by the Khaleej Times. According to AFP, it is the first time in 20 years that Iran has been reported to the Security Council for failing to comply with its nuclear reporting obligations.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday, September 25, 2026, that there are no specific details yet regarding the organization of a trilateral meeting on Ukraine, Sputnik Globe reports. The United States has proposed technical-level trilateral talks between Ukraine, the United States and Russia, with the United Arab Emirates suggested as the venue, and Kyiv is waiting for Washington to set a date, according to the Kyiv Post.
Ethiopia’s army said it repelled attacks by Tigrayan forces and their allies in parts of the north of the country, its first military statement since fighting resumed on September 24, 2026, according to the BBC. On Wednesday, September 23, 2026, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which dominates the region, seized control of three airports from federal police, including the one in Mekelle, and Ethiopian Airlines cancelled flights to Tigray, the BBC reports. Residents of Mekelle said the city is calm but tense, with fighting outside the city limits and the risk of communications being cut and of cash shortages, according to the BBC.
Iran’s seven-day roadmap to end the war with the United States provides for an end to hostilities on all fronts, the release of at least US$ 12 billion in frozen assets, relief from sanctions on Iranian oil and the lifting of the naval blockade, with the Strait of Hormuz reopening on the seventh day, Al Jazeera reports. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the plan was delivered to Washington through intermediaries and that a deal should be sealed before the U.S. midterm elections, he told Al Jazeera.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Uganda at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly for erecting a statue of his brother Yonatan at the place in Entebbe where he was killed, according to the speech transcript. The monument was unveiled on August 1 at Entebbe’s old terminal by Uganda’s military chief, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the Associated Press (AP) reports. Netanyahu spoke on September 24 before a hall largely emptied by delegations walking out, according to Pulse Uganda.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Kirill Dmitriev, President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy, is continuing contacts with U.S. negotiators focused on potential economic cooperation, TASS reports. According to Peskov, such cooperation is “currently absent,” but there is an understanding it could be mutually beneficial and that discussions about the possibilities are under way, the agency reports.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called Chinese President Xi Jinping’s remarks to Donald Trump in Washington on national reunification and territorial integrity a distortion of the facts, according to Reuters. The ministry said the statements reflect “the consistent Chinese approach of distorting facts and unilaterally conveying its position and claims,” that only the Taiwanese people decide the island’s future, and accused China of disturbing peace and stability, G1 reports. Xi had urged Trump to keep to the “correct position” of opposing Taiwan independence, Reuters added.
Poland stopped registering asylum applications on the border with Belarus in March 2025 and has kept the measure in place for 18 months, the Associated Press reports. Warsaw wants the European Union (EU) to authorize temporary suspensions of asylum applications in cases of “instrumentalized” migration, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on September 16 a proposal for a European framework to respond to “planned and weaponized” migration, the Associated Press adds.
The Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the Rostov region temporarily suspended operations after a drone attack, the Straits Times reports, citing governor Yuri Slyusar. Russian air defenses destroyed about 50 drones over the region overnight, and the export-oriented refinery — with annual capacity of 5 million metric tons — halted activity, according to the same Straits Times report.
Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) put turnout in the State Duma elections at 59.8%, with 67,448,094 ballots cast, TASS reports, citing commission chairwoman Ella Pamfilova. United Russia took 349 seats — 140 in the federal district and 209 in single-member constituencies — Sputnik Globe reports from the same count, below the earlier projection of around 355 seats noted by The Moscow Times.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and backed a diplomatic way out of the Gulf crisis, Sputnik Globe reports, citing a Russian Foreign Ministry statement. The statement blames the United States and Israel for the crisis and says there is no alternative to a diplomatic settlement, as the Jerusalem Post notes on the meeting.
Russian President Vladimir Putin relieved Andrei Kelin of his post as ambassador to Britain, a position he had held since November 2019, in a decree published on Friday, September 25, 2026, according to TASS. The Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed the end of Kelin's planned tenure and said Putin will name a replacement “in due course,” according to The Moscow Times.
Saudi Arabia is meeting military chiefs from Pakistan and Türkiye to discuss options under the Mecca pact, as France confirmed it is sending soldiers, radars and defense systems to guard the Yanbu oil terminal, according to Al Jazeera. The Houthis launched an offensive along the Red Sea coast this month, amid the U.S.-led war against Iran, with fighting spreading across Yemen, according to The Washington Post.
Russia's Defense Ministry said it intercepted 592 Ukrainian drones between the evening of September 24 and the morning of September 25, Moscow time, told TASS. One man was killed by drone shrapnel in the Perm region and 8 people were wounded in Ulyanovsk, including teenagers aged 14 and 17, according to regional governors. Overnight, drones struck industrial sites in Rostov — including the Novoshakhtinsk refinery — Perm, Ulyanovsk and Voronezh, according to Ukrinform.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb appealed to American businessman Elon Musk to expand Starlink coverage and let Ukraine strike ballistic-missile launchers inside Russia, according to TASS. Musk said enabling that use requires a White House decision, and Trump gave no clear answer to Zelensky's requests, according to the Russian agency.
Providers in Kyiv reported damage to data centers in the Russian attack of September 23, leaving about 100,000 households with internet problems in the capital and surroundings, according to the Kyiv Independent. An expert heard by TASS said the strikes on data centers will “disrupt troop control” by Ukrainian forces, which relies on the internet, according to TASS.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said U.S. President Donald Trump gave “final approval” for Ukraine to produce Patriot missiles under license, according to G1. Trump had offered the license in July at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Ankara, then reversed course on July 31, saying “we have not agreed to that,” according to ABC News.
Chinese journalist Li Xiang said the killing of women, children and civilians is a “red line” when commenting on the attack on the Starobelsk Pedagogical College, he told TASS. According to the Russian account — still without independent confirmation — Ukrainian drones struck the college’s academic building and dormitory on the night of May 22, 2026, killing 21 people, with 86 children present, according to TASS.
European Commissioner for Energy Dan Jorgensen told the Financial Times that the European Union could face its worst winter since 2022, with record energy prices and possible supply problems coming from the United States, according to TASS, which reproduces the interview. Diesel in Europe is near record highs and U.S. President Donald Trump said he intends to back a ban on the country’s diesel exports, also according to TASS. The diesel price hit an all-time high of €2.23 per liter, according to European Commission data cited by the AFP news agency, in the TASS reproduction.
North Korea said South Korea would be a decisive target of collective retaliation if it serves as a hub of the United States collective defense system, in an article by Kang Chol Su, a department director at the Institute of Enemy State Studies, according to TASS, reproducing the North Korean state agency KCNA. The article cites remarks by the commander of the two countries’ forces about Seoul as a collective defense hub, also according to the TASS reproduction.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband in New York on the sidelines of the 81st UN General Assembly, Mehr News Agency reports. Miliband said the United Kingdom “will not tolerate intimidation, threats or hostile activity on UK soil” and urged de-escalation and diplomacy instead of prolonging the war, stressing the importance of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, according to the BBC. Senior Iranian officials say Washington has four to five days to respond to Tehran’s conditions for reopening the strait, according to The Guardian.
Gaza’s economy is going through the worst economic crisis on record, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said, according to France24. The report finds 92% of economic establishments damaged or destroyed and daily per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $0.58, according to the Times of Israel liveblog.
Ukraine killed two people in overnight drone attacks on Russia and struck an oil refinery and a passenger train, Russian officials said, according to Devdiscourse. In the Perm region, home to a major refinery, Governor Dmitry Makhonin said one man died during a massive drone attack, according to Devdiscourse.
Qasim Khan, son of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, urged the public not to march or protest near Adiala Jail on September 27, according to UrduPoint. He said the protest could serve as a pretext for a “counter-operation” inside the prison, putting his father’s life at risk, according to Republic World.
All 14 Kazakh servicemen killed during a naval exercise in the Mangystau region, in the Caspian Sea, were recovered after the rescue operation was completed, Kazakhstan’s Defense Ministry said, according to TASS. In total, 17 servicemen were swept out to sea on September 24 amid severe weather and gusty winds, and 3 were rescued, according to TASS.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it hit enterprises of the military-industrial complex, logistics centres and naval vessels linked to Ukrainian forces on the night of September 25, Izvestia reports, citing the ministry. The alleged targets include a drone assembly site in Borispol, logistics centres in Odessa and Nerubayskoye, and the port of Reni.
Swedish and Finnish fighter jets were scrambled on Thursday, September 24, to intercept and identify Russian military aircraft, CGTN reports, citing the Finnish Air Force. Reuters also recorded the interception of a Russian military aircraft by Swedish and Finnish jets.
Moldovan Prime Minister Vasile Tofan said the country does not plan to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), citing the neutrality enshrined in the Constitution, in a Bloomberg interview cited by Sputnik. Tofan said he wants to keep a good relationship with the alliance — including Romania.
Rebels in Ethiopia’s Tigray region seized local airports and launched attacks into the neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions, saying they were once again in “full-blown war” with the federal government, RFI reports, citing AFP. Ethiopian forces battled overnight to repel an assault in the Afar region, while monitor NetBlocks recorded an internet disruption in the north of the country, consistent with a telecoms blackout in Tigray.
Thousands of people marched in Tehran in the “Sacrifice for Iran” (Janfada-e-Iran, in Persian) campaign, from Imam Hossein Square to Enghelab Square, reports Mehr News Agency. The rally was a government-organised demonstration with hundreds of thousands of participants pledging readiness to take up arms, describes Al Jazeera. At the rally, the government unveiled a new volunteer force with limited military and emergency-response training to serve as an additional security layer for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij militia, according to the broadcaster. Iranian authorities said 313,000 people joined the event in the capital, a figure that could not be independently verified, the broadcaster notes.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul in New York on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), according to IRNA. Iran’s state news agency says Araghchi has held a series of bilaterals with counterparts on the session’s sidelines.
Amnesty International has called for the abolition of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in a report published on Thursday, September 24, 2026, according to the organization itself. The report “We Had Whistles, They Had Guns” documents widespread human rights violations by ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other federal agencies during immigration operations in Chicago, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, New Orleans and Washington, DC, the group reports. Le Monde confirms the nongovernmental organization’s (NGO) appeal, citing the documented violations.
United States President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping met at the White House in Washington on Thursday, September 24, 2026, on the second day of Xi’s three-day state visit — his first to Washington in 11 years, according to Al Jazeera, with Reuters and the Associated Press (AP). China’s state news agency Xinhua, cited by the broadcaster, reported that Xi urged Washington to handle Taiwan prudently and oppose the island’s independence; the White House published no readout of its own. On the war with Iran there was no breakthrough: Xi backed a return by Washington and Tehran to the interim agreement meant to pave the way for a larger deal.
Ship-to-ship oil transfers in the Gulf of Oman have reached their limits after Saudi Arabia diverted exports from the Red Sea, according to Reuters via The Hindu. Saudi crude exports via the Strait of Hormuz were on track to rebound to 3.6 million barrels per day (bpd) in September, up from about 900,000 bpd in August, according to data from analytics firm Kpler cited in the report. State-run Saudi Aramco has sold more than 60 million barrels for transfer off Sohar, Oman, this month and next, since its East–West Pipeline was attacked on September 13.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Tarique Rahman and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York and vowed to deepen bilateral cooperation with Dhaka and Tehran, according to the Hindustan Times, citing the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency. With Pezeshkian, Sharif said he had reaffirmed ties with Iran and urged restraint, de-escalation and sustained diplomacy in the face of the prolonged conflict, according to a post by the premier himself cited by the paper.
Colombia severed diplomatic relations with Iran effective 19 September 2026, according to The Rio Times, which cited Colombian radio station Caracol and the country’s Foreign Ministry statement. The government cited human rights violations, alleged Iranian links to terrorist and narcoterrorist groups, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and obstruction of the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and kept consular relations, according to the Venezuelan state outlet teleSUR, which also cited the ministry’s statement.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov handed United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres a Russian report on the alleged falsification of the events in Bucha, on the sidelines of the General Assembly, and asked the UN Secretariat to examine the case in detail, according to the Russian state news agency TASS, which cited the Russian foreign ministry. According to TASS, the report attributes the episode to Ukraine and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) sponsors. The UN has not confirmed the handover of the document, and the accusation comes from the Russian side.
The outgoing commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said in Geneva in his last press conference before leaving office that the agency must be part of a political solution for the population it serves, and warned that UNRWA is near collapse, with funding for water, health and education services expected to last only until September, according to Geneva Solutions. On 1 July 2026, the Board of Peace (BoP), the body created by Donald Trump’s peace plan with a central role in Gaza’s reconstruction, had already said UNRWA “has no place” in the territory’s future, according to The Jerusalem Post.
Pakistan’s security forces foiled an attempt by Afghan Taliban fighters to carry out an attack in the Gulistan sector, on the border between the two countries, and killed several of them in a retaliatory operation, according to The News, which cited security sources. An attempted Afghan incursion was repelled and several Afghan Taliban members were killed, Pakistani security sources told Reuters, which reported intermittent exchanges of fire and border forces on alert. Hours earlier, Pakistan had carried out precision air and drone strikes on 10 targets in Afghanistan in response to attempted drone attacks it attributed to the Taliban government, and shot down 8 drones entering from Afghan airspace, according to Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, as quoted by The News.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said his country did not choose the war and that it was forced upon it, and said an agreement with the United States had already been reached and signed before the escalation, according to Sputnik Globe, which carried an interview with Fox News. “We did not choose war. The war was imposed on us. We do not seek war,” he said, warning in the same interview that Iran will respond “strongly” if attacks continue, according to The Hill.
Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) meets on Friday, 25 September 2026, to establish the final results of the election to the ninth convocation of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, according to the TASS news agency. Regional commissions were given until 25 September to review all complaints and appeals filed and complete the necessary inquiries before the official outcome is proclaimed, CEC chair Ella Pamfilova told the agency.
Security cameras near the New York City hotel where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was planning to stay recorded three men emerging from sewers before dawn on Wednesday, according to NBC News, which cited police. The outlet said the appearance does not appear to be connected to the prime minister or to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly under way in Manhattan.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortened his trip to the United States and returned home on the night of Thursday, 24 September 2026, right after addressing the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly, according to Dawn. His stay in New York was limited to a few hours, and the immediate departure after the speech was reported by Israel’s public broadcaster Kan, carried by Middle East Eye. The decision not to extend his stay followed a recommendation from security officials presented to Netanyahu in talks held in the previous days, Channel 13 reported, cited by Dawn.
One man was killed and another wounded in Russia’s Belgorod Region, on the border with Ukraine, after a Ukrainian drone hit a truck, according to the regional crisis response centre cited by TASS. In the Volga region of Ulyanovsk, the agency reported a massive drone attack that wounded at least seven adults and one child. Both tolls come from Russian official sources and have no independent confirmation.
The European Union (EU) is weighing measures to curb the return of Russian and Belarusian athletes to international competitions under their national flags, according to reporting by Euractiv. The options under discussion include targeted sanctions, visa restrictions and possible funding curbs; Russian state broadcaster RT reports that the proposals sit in a non-paper by the EU diplomatic service and the European Commission and that no formal proposal by the bloc exists yet.
Pope Leo XIV begins on Friday, 25 September 2026, in Paris the first official papal visit to France in 18 years, according to Vatican News. The last papal trip classified as an official visit was Benedict XVI’s, in September 2008, Euronews recalls, which reports a four-day schedule including an address at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a meeting with sexual abuse survivors in Lourdes and an open-air Mass in Paris with 600,000 people expected by French authorities.
Young men in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region say they are leaving because they fear being forcibly recruited to fight as political and military tensions rise, according to Al Jazeera; Human Rights Watch reported in July 2026 that Tigrayan authorities and forces had forcibly recruited civilians, including children as young as 15, since at least April 2026; the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) disputes the allegations, saying young people are joining voluntarily, the outlet reports.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidential campaign has accused Donald Trump, in a television advert broadcast on Thursday, 24 September 2026, of wanting to “colonise” Brazil in order to capture its natural resources by meddling in October’s presidential election, according to The Guardian; in the one-minute video, a female narrator says that Flávio Bolsonaro is “Trump’s candidate” and that what Trump wants is to “colonise Brazil, take our riches, steal our future and leave us in the dust”; the US State Department has denied meddling and said, in an August statement cited by the paper, that “any insinuation of a ‘ploy’ to undermine a democratic nation’s election is a baseless lie”.
Kirill Dmitriev, special envoy of the Russian president and chief executive of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), met in New York with US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, according to TASS, which attributed the report to CNN sources; the three discussed US-Russia cooperation and a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine, the Russian agency reports; TASS adds that Witkoff and Kushner visited Moscow on September 5, 2026, where President Vladimir Putin received them, and met Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in Kyiv the following day.
A massive drone attack is under way in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk, in the Volga region, on Friday, September 25, 2026, with damage to industrial and civilian infrastructure and casualties, according to regional governor Alexey Russkikh, in a message on the Max messenger cited by TASS; “air defenses and our mobile fire groups continue to repel a massive drone attack on the city of Ulyanovsk,” the governor said, adding that the casualties are receiving medical assistance; according to monitoring channels cited by the Kyiv Independent, the Iskra plant, which makes components for communications and radio technology, was struck in the city.
Yemen’s Houthis said on Thursday, September 24, 2026, that they had launched missiles and drones at a “sensitive target” in Riyadh and at Aramco facilities in the Red Sea city of Yanbu, according to Al Jazeera; oil rose the same day: Brent futures for November ended above US$106.50 a barrel, after earlier exceeding US$108 and settled at US$106.60, up US$3.52, or 3.4%, according to The Vibes; according to Middle East Eye, vessel transits in the Strait of Hormuz fell to nine on Thursday, from 14 the day before and a 10-day average of about 18, preliminary ship-tracking data showed.
24 Sep
China’s president, Xi Jinping, said he had a sincere and in-depth exchange of views with United States president Donald Trump during the state dinner at the White House, according to TASS; Xi added that the meeting infused new substance into constructive relations based on strategic stability, the Russian agency reports.
At least 20 authors of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have direct ties to the oil and gas sector, Le Monde revealed, drawing on reporting conducted with European outlets; at least 12 of the roughly 220 authors of the mitigation section of the forthcoming report hold jobs or ties with Saudi Aramco or the Saudi fossil sector, according to the paper; a Guardian-led review with partners found 20 cases of strong potential conflict of interest, 11 of them Saudi-linked.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations (UN), Danny Danon, approached an Iranian diplomat at the General Assembly to offer the Starlink terminal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had displayed in his speech as a tool for Iranians to bypass censorship, according to Middle East Eye; the Iranian representative ignored Danon, looked away and did not engage, the outlet reports; India Today recorded the on-stage display.
Chinese Vice President Han Zheng addresses the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on Friday, September 25, 2026, standing in for President Xi Jinping, according to G1. Xi arrived in Washington on Wednesday, September 23, for a bilateral meeting with United States President Donald Trump.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran is ready for agreements with the United States within the framework of international law, in a Fox News interview in New York, according to TASS. According to the report, Pezeshkian added that Tehran does not base decisions on American elections and would accept a deal before or after the vote.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Thursday, September 25, 2026, the deployment of soldiers, radar and air defense systems to protect the Yanbu terminal, in Saudi Arabia, after Houthi attacks on the East–West pipeline terminal on the Red Sea. According to the broadcaster, the mission is described as strictly defensive, with no direct combat against the Houthis.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said relations between Russia and Japan keep deteriorating severely, with contacts limited to isolated matters, and placed the initiative to normalize the situation with Tokyo, in an interview with TASS.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s cabinet adopted on Thursday, September 24, 2026, a decree-law banning the burqa and niqab in schools and capping at 30% the share of pupils without Italian proficiency per class starting next year, according to Al Jazeera and confirmed by ANSA. Non-compliance carries a fine of up to 1,000 euros — and the decree takes effect immediately but needs parliamentary ratification within 60 days.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said it is up to the United States to decide when the war between the two countries ends and denied that Tehran seeks a nuclear bomb, in an interview with Fox News aired on September 24, 2026 and covered by The Hindu. He said Iran is willing to dilute uranium under external verification — and Brent crude prices fell on hopes of a truce, according to Middle East Eye.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is in good health and in full control of the country, in a Fox News interview reported by Russia’s TASS news agency, in which he said he met Khamenei face to face for seven hours about a month to a month and a half ago. In the same interview, Pezeshkian denied that Tehran directs the battle plans of Yemen’s Houthis, saying “the Houthis are responsible for their own actions” and take no orders from Tehran, according to the Middle East Eye. On the June memorandum of understanding (MoU), Pezeshkian said the text outlined a temporary ceasefire before talks collapsed, according to News18.
Chinese President Xi Jinping called on the United States and China to manage their superpower rivalry and keep artificial intelligence (AI) under human control, during his state visit to the White House in Washington on Thursday, September 24, 2026, according to AFP via The Standard. Xi said both countries have the capability and the responsibility to develop and manage AI for good, ensuring it always remains under human control.
Nepal’s Prime Minister Balendra Shah told the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York on Thursday, September 24, 2026, that last month’s floods were “a warning to the world” about the rising dangers of climate change in the Himalayas. Shah, whose country contributes less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, said Nepal “did not create this crisis, yet is paying for it,” and proposed a Himalaya Climate Resilience Mechanism with India and China to share satellite data, monitor glacial lakes and strengthen joint early warning systems. The floods killed more than 1,400 people, left 6,000 missing and caused devastation worth billions of dollars, according to France24.
Wildfires in West Kalimantan province, on Borneo, are among the worst in 11 years under “super-El Niño” conditions driving up temperatures and causing severe droughts, according to Reuters. More than 12.5 million people have been exposed to haze across seven provinces on Borneo and Sumatra, and wildfire-related respiratory cases more than doubled to 113,336 by September 9, from 50,891 on September 1, according to Indonesian health ministry data. The transboundary smog has turned the air unhealthy in neighboring Singapore and Malaysia.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orban said she is ready to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to discuss bilateral relations, in remarks to the Index news portal during the high-level week of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), according to TASS; she said that although she has not yet spoken with Lavrov, diplomatic relations continue as normal.
Marine Le Pen said she does not want France to go to war with any nuclear power, recalling that Russia is a nuclear power, according to TASS; in an interview, she stated that under her presidency France would not contribute financial aid to Ukraine.
Reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were barred from the White House on the morning after Federal Judge Timothy Kelly's order immediately restoring the three outlets' access for 14 days; the ruling ordered the immediate return of the outlets' credentials, as set out in the court order, with reports of passes confiscated by the United States Secret Service.
Donald Trump hosted Xi Jinping at a White House state dinner attended by top United States tech and business leaders, including the chiefs of Nvidia, OpenAI, Google and Meta, with no Chinese executive on the official list.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was confronted at United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York with questions about Hafiz Saeed and the alleged harbouring of terrorists and gave no answer; on his way in, a reporter asked when he would stop harbouring terrorists and, on his way out, when he would prosecute Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) chief Hafiz Saeed, receiving no reply.
The second Global Digital Forum, set for October 8–10, 2026 in Moscow, has drawn applications from representatives of more than 100 countries, including dozens of high-level delegations, according to TASS; the event's official website confirms the dates and program.
The United Arab Emirates barred Iranian airlines under pressure from United States (US) sanctions on Iran's aviation sector, according to Al Jazeera. The move follows Operation Economic Outcast, in which the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned 36 targets tied to the sector on September 8.
Poverty in Argentina rose to 32.3% in the first half of 2026, up from 28.2% in the previous half, according to official data from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC), as incomes failed to keep pace with the cost of basic goods. Extreme poverty rose from 6.3% to 7.5%, with some 9.7 million people in the surveyed urban areas living below the poverty line.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu singled out Zohran Mamdani by name in his September 24 address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, calling him antisemitic and saying many Jews no longer feel safe in New York. Mamdani hit back, accusing Netanyahu of repeating lies to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow expects the national leaders of the Sahel to attend the Russia-Africa summit, scheduled for 28 and 29 October in Moscow, according to the state news agency TASS. Russia’s foreign ministry says the dialogue with the Confederation of Sahel States is moving fast and cites the consultations held on 8 July in Niamey.
Federal judge Timothy Kelly ordered the White House to return the credentials of CNN, MS Now and Politico for 14 days for lack of due process, and the three outlets were allowed back into the White House on Thursday afternoon, 24 September 2026, many hours after the ruling. Even after the order, reporters said they were blocked at the gate and had their passes confiscated; the White House said access was restored from 9:07 a.m.
Iran has conveyed to mediators its conditions for returning to negotiations to end the war, and Tehran is pressing for the United States to return to the memorandum of understanding (MoU) before November’s midterm elections. Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, said he sent the conditions through Qatar, including an end to the war on all fronts and an end to the naval blockade. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tehran wants the Americans back in the memorandum before the midterms. The New York Times reported that Iran proposed a seven-day plan to end the war.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Thursday, 24 September 2026, that the United States and China reached a common understanding on many issues in his meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House. Xi called on the two militaries to keep regular dialogue and improve crisis communication and prevention mechanisms, the formula Beijing uses to avoid the “Thucydides trap”. The trade truce between the two countries, which was due to expire in November, was extended by two months, to 10 January.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan will hold an urgent meeting of their chiefs of staff, announced by the Saudi foreign ministry, to discuss ways to back Riyadh in the escalation with Yemen’s Houthis. The barrage of ballistic missiles and drones against Saudi targets, which included the holy city of Mecca, is testing the mutual defence pact signed in August with Turkey and Pakistan. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement states that an armed attack against one of the three countries is considered an attack against all of them.
Costa Rican President Laura Fernández dismissed Foreign Minister Manuel Tovar on Thursday, September 24, 2026, after he attended a regional security meeting in New York chaired by Donald Trump without her knowledge or approval. The Costa Rican government said his negligence caused significant strategic damage by keeping Fernández from taking part in the meeting.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday, September 24, 2026, on the sidelines of the High-Level Week of the 81st General Assembly, behind closed doors and without statements to the press, according to Russian state agency TASS. The meeting had been on the schedule since Monday, when UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said it was set for Thursday evening.
About 100 protesters were detained by New York City police on Thursday, September 24, 2026, at the protest against Benjamin Netanyahu outside the United Nations (UN) headquarters, before Israel’s prime minister delivered his speech to the General Assembly. Among those held were Oscar-winning actor Susan Sarandon and Hacks star Hannah Einbinder, and hundreds of people blocked traffic on the streets around the UN through the day. The action was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, a US Jewish group critical of the Israeli occupation.
US President Donald Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House on Thursday, 24 September 2026, in a state visit with artificial intelligence, critical minerals, human rights, tariffs and Taiwan on the agenda. As of the time of writing, the two sides had announced no comprehensive deals on tariffs, rare earths or soybean purchases, and the trade truce between them was extended by two months. Xi told reporters that “achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Thursday, 24 September 2026, that Tehran had given the United States a proposal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart talks on ending the war within seven days. The text has not been released. Regional sources cited by The National describe a regionwide ceasefire of up to 60 days, a phased reopening of the Strait and an end to the US blockade. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a Fox News interview that the choice rests with Washington: “It’s America that must choose whether it wants to end this or not.”
Dozens of delegates walked out of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly hall as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage on Thursday, 24 September 2026, in a protest caught on video. In the address that followed, Netanyahu defended Israel’s military campaigns in Iran, Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East, rejected the accusation of genocide and said the country would keep fighting: “We’re going to win. We have no other choice.”
James Copenhaver, one of the men wounded in the 2024 assassination attempt against then-candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, died on Wednesday, 23 September 2026, at age 76, according to the Allegheny County Office of the Medical Examiner, which did not release the cause. His family confirmed the death through a lawyer. Copenhaver was in the bleachers when the gunman opened fire; Trump was wounded in the ear and Corey Comperatore was killed in the attack.
The Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted six Houthi ballistic missiles on Thursday, 24 September 2026, thwarting attacks on Taif and Yanbu, after warnings were issued for several regions of the kingdom, including Mecca. French President Emmanuel Macron said France planned to send “military assets, meaning soldiers, radars and defence systems to protect” the Red Sea oil terminal of Yanbu.
23 Sep
South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir dissolved the Transitional Government of National Unity on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, and appointed a caretaker administration to lead the country to the December 22 election, the first since independence in 2011. The decree, read out by the state broadcaster, removed all vice presidents, ministers and local administrators and dissolved the national and state assemblies; the judiciary and security institutions remained in place, and Kiir stays in office “during the election period until the next elected president assumes office”, according to Al Jazeera. The move came a day after parliament passed amendments to the National Elections Act that unlinked the vote from the completion of a permanent constitution and a census, changes Kiir signed late on Monday and that the South Sudan Opposition Alliance rejected, according to Reuters, saying they were made without adequate consultation among the parties to the 2018 peace deal. Kiir’s longtime rival Riek Machar, who leads the main opposition party, has been under house arrest since March 2025 and is on trial on charges including treason and murder, which he denies. A permanent constitution, voter registration and the unification of armed forces loyal to rival parties all remain outstanding. Amnesty International called the decree a step toward the vote and urged conditions for people to vote and stand; analysts cited by Agence France-Presse said the amendments concentrate power in the president. The civil war that ended in 2018 killed about 400,000 people and displaced millions, according to the United Nations.
Armed men stormed a house in the KwaMakhutha township, about 30 kilometers south of Durban, on the night of Tuesday, September 22, 2026, and killed at least 11 people attending a party, including a woman believed to be pregnant; three others were wounded, according to South African police cited by The Hindu and Al Jazeera. KwaZulu-Natal Premier Thamsanqa Ntuli said the assailants entered shortly before 11 p.m. (UTC-4) and that the motive is not known; local broadcaster eNCA reported that the victims were forced into a single room before the shooting. Police said some of the dead were already on the crime intelligence radar over suspected illegal activities and that a feud between rival groupings cannot be ruled out. South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates, with an average of about 60 killings a day in a population of roughly 62 million, according to Al Jazeera.
Moroccans vote on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, to elect the 395 seats of the House of Representatives, the 12th legislative election since independence, with 28 parties and two lists of independent candidates running, according to the government’s official portal Maroc.ma. The registered electorate stands at 15,801,162, of whom 55% live in urban areas and 46% are women, the portal says. Polls open at 8 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. local time, and preliminary results usually come the following day, according to Reuters. France 24 reports that the vote follows a rush of migrants to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and comes amid young people’s disenchantment with politics, with turnout read as a barometer of confidence in elected institutions.
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said he cannot entertain diplomatic relations with Israel while the rights of Syrians are usurped, citing as core concerns the territories Israel has occupied since December 2024 and the Golan Heights, speaking at a panel hosted by the Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, according to Middle East Eye. He said talks with Israel reached ‘almost 90 per cent’ agreement before Israeli pullbacks and that Damascus regards the Golan as Syrian territory whose sovereignty is not open to negotiation, according to the Jerusalem Post. Al-Sharaa also said Russia kept 170 bases in Syria and now operates two, both for training Syrian forces, according to Middle East Eye.
During the address that opened the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, US President Donald Trump said he would decide between a deal with Iran and ‘annihilating the Islamic Republic’; as he began speaking about US military operations, Iran’s delegation walked out of the hall, leaving a single lower-level staff member behind, according to Al Jazeera. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei confirmed the partial walkout and told the Iranian state news agency IRNA that one diplomat from Iran’s mission stayed in the room because the delegation attended at foreign minister level, according to ANI. Baghaei said the US administration turns the Assembly into a stage for military threats that are ‘absolutely illegal, contrary to international law and diplomatic custom’, and called the threat of a military attack ‘an admission of committing international crimes’. Iranian state broadcaster IRIB, cited by Al Jazeera, reported that Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accepted a meeting requested by US envoy Steve Witkoff to restate Iran’s conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz: an immediate end to the naval blockade, the release of frozen Iranian assets and an end to the war. Al Jazeera notes that accounts differ over whether the two delegations met directly.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office called ‘grotesque absurdity’ French President Emmanuel Macron’s claim at the UN General Assembly that Hamas has never operated in the West Bank, according to Agence France-Presse, carried by Channel NewsAsia. The Israeli statement said Hamas militants attack Jews in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli name for the West Bank, ‘almost every day’ and that ‘ignorance is no excuse for erasing their blood’. The Jerusalem Post reports that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich accused Macron of lying and cited the killing of a French-Israeli father of six in an attack attributed to Hamas in the West Bank on Sunday, September 20, 2026, two days before the speech. Macron spoke in French, and published renderings of his remark vary between ‘never operated’ and ‘never caused trouble’ in the West Bank; he criticised daily violations in the territory and called the humanitarian situation in Gaza ‘a spectacle that shames us all’.
Hurricane Polo intensified to Category 5, the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale, on Tuesday night, September 22, 2026, with maximum sustained winds of 165 mph (265 kph), and was centred about 210 miles (338 kilometres) south of Zihuatanejo off Mexico’s Pacific coast, according to the Associated Press, citing data from the US National Hurricane Center, which has active advisories for the storm. The centre warned that tropical storm conditions were expected along the coasts of Guerrero, Michoacán and Colima, forecast 3 to 6 inches (8 to 15 centimetres) of rain with a risk of mudslides, and said Polo should track west-northwest without making landfall, according to AP. It is the third Category 5 hurricane of the Pacific season after Genevieve and Lowell, and Colorado State University researcher Philip Klotzbach attributed the rapid intensification to El Niño.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov meet in New York on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, on the sidelines of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, according to the State Department, cited by the Kyiv Independent and the Ukrainian news agency UNN. The meeting was scheduled for 9 a.m. (UTC-4) and comes a day after President Donald Trump’s talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said he was ready for an energy ceasefire if Russia accepts the same terms. Lavrov addresses the Assembly on Saturday, September 26, and Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the agenda includes Moscow–Washington relations and cooperation between the two countries at the UN.
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) estimated that an extreme El Niño event would cause a cumulative loss of at least 2% of regional gross domestic product (GDP) over three years, half of it in the first year, and could add up to 4.8 million people to poverty by the end of the decade compared with a scenario without the phenomenon. ECLAC’s third Special Report, released on 21 September 2026, points to critical vulnerability in energy, fishing, agriculture and infrastructure and recommends ten public policy measures, according to the agency’s press release. Projections by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cited in the report indicate a more than 90% probability that the phenomenon will reach very high intensity in the northern hemisphere’s fall and winter of 2026-2027 and a 69% probability of historic magnitude, a “Super El Niño”; for the October-December 2026 quarter, the probability of a rainfall deficit is 60%, and 31.1% of the region’s territory is on high alert, according to Xinhua.
An investigation by the consortium coordinated by Forbidden Stories has obtained a copy of the agreement under which Eswatini takes in deportees from the United States, according to France 24, which is part of the consortium. The document, signed on 14 May 2025 by Prime Minister Russell Dlamini, provides for the kingdom to receive 160 people removed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in exchange for $5.1 million to “reinforce border and migrant migration capacity”. Four planes have brought 32 deportees to the kingdom over a year; they are held without charge at the Matsapha maximum-security prison, and only five have returned to their home countries.
Iran’s Oil Ministry said about 50% of the damaged capacity at the South Pars gas field has returned to service, after the Israeli strike of 18 March 2026 that halted output at two refineries in the Asaluyeh complex and cut Iranian gas flows to Iraq, as The National reported at the time. The deputy oil minister for planning said production in that section resumed by 22 September 2026 and that the recovery program will be completed before winter begins, according to Mehr News. The field supplies about 75% of the country’s gas consumption and underpins nearly 80% of its electricity generation, according to a report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty carried by GlobalSecurity.org.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has launched a petition calling for the suspension of Israel’s membership in the United Nations, addressed to the president of the 81st General Assembly, Khalilur Rahman, Bangladesh’s foreign minister, and arguing that Israel should be treated as South Africa was during the apartheid era. Released on Wednesday, 23 September 2026, during the Assembly’s general debate, the petition says Israel has violated international law, failed to comply with resolutions and decisions by UN bodies and the International Court of Justice and targeted UN facilities and personnel, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA.
Amnesty International called on the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) to suspend Israel’s football association, saying Israel’s participation in the UEFA Nations League, whose group phase opens on 24 September 2026, is “unconscionable” while clubs based in illegal settlements remain in Israel’s domestic leagues. Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s director for Europe, said UEFA and FIFA “should have suspended” the Israeli association long ago for refusing to exclude settlement clubs, in the statement published by the organisation itself (Amnesty International) and carried by Arab News. Israel is in League B with Austria, Ireland and Kosovo; the Ireland–Israel games were scheduled for neutral venues in Hungary and Serbia, behind closed doors, after the Football Association of Ireland asked UEFA to consider suspending the Israeli team. FIFA decided in March 2026 to take no action against the Israeli association, and the Palestinian Football Association appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Envoys of US President Donald Trump, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, met Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi for about three hours on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, on the sidelines of the 81st UN General Assembly in New York — the first round of talks since the June ceasefire collapsed, according to the BBC. The meeting was mediated by Qatar and no breakthrough was announced; Witkoff said a round of discussions had been completed “that we hope will prove constructive and promising,” and Tehran repeated its demand that Washington end its “acts of aggression.” Hours earlier, in the address that opened the Assembly, Trump said he would decide between a deal with Iran and “annihilating the Islamic Republic,” and said he believed a deal would come right after November’s congressional elections. Oil prices fell after the talks were announced, according to Gulf News, which carries the Associated Press coverage.
An Israeli air strike hit al-Khiam, in southern Lebanon, overnight into Wednesday, 23 September 2026, damaging transmission lines and cutting power to the entire Nabaa el-Hamas area, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), cited by Middle East Eye. A large explosion in al-Khiam, in the Nabatieh governorate, was felt across southern Lebanon, the agency reported. On Tuesday, 22 September, Israeli artillery struck the towns of Al-Mansouri and Baraachit, and Israeli forces advanced on Al-Mansouri with military vehicles and bulldozers, detonating houses in the town’s Fourth Neighbourhood that had been rigged with explosives, according to NNA.
Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, condemned Israel’s declared rejection of the roadmap to complete the implementation of the plan to end the war in Gaza, at a closed meeting of heads of state and government convened by French President Emmanuel Macron, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York, according to Mehr News, citing Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to the ministry, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman urged the international community to press Israel to meet its obligations under the Gaza ceasefire agreement and to halt violations of Palestinian rights, and reaffirmed Qatar’s support for a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel rejected the 15-point plan put forward by the mediators in August and conditions any withdrawal from Gaza on Hamas disarming, according to Mehr News.
Eleven people were killed and three wounded in a mass shooting late on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, in the Ziko area of KwaMakhutha, south of Durban, South Africa. Gunmen stormed a house where 14 people were gathered and opened fire shortly before 11 p.m. local time (5 p.m. (UTC-4)), according to South African broadcaster eNCA and Eyewitness News. A pregnant woman is among the dead: 10 people died at the scene and one on the way to hospital. The attackers also set fire to a car belonging to one of the victims, eNCA reported. KwaMakhutha police and the eThekwini district tracing team are at the scene and have not yet given a motive, according to The Citizen.
The United States Department of Justice told a federal court that the president can restrict reporters’ access to the White House, including on the basis of their coverage, and that “access to the White House is a privilege, not a right”, according to the filing submitted late on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, and reported by the Times of India. The filing says the administration can deny entry to restricted areas for “viewpoint-discriminatory reasons” and that the First Amendment does not give journalists an independent right of access. It answers the lawsuit filed by CNN, MS NOW and Politico, whose credentials were seized on Saturday, 19 September; the outlets are seeking a temporary restraining order, with a hearing set for Wednesday, 23 September, before US District Judge Timothy Kelly, according to the Times of India, the Associated Press and MS NOW. The White House gave the three newsrooms until Friday, 25 September, to contest the decision and the facts it cites, and the letters mention reporting on a bunker beneath the White House east wing, on depleted US missile-defence interceptor stocks and on FBI leak investigations, according to the Times of India.
The countries of the Americas Shield signed on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, a joint declaration designating 24 organisations as “transnational narcoterrorist organisations” and “shared threats”, according to CNN Brasil, G1 and Veja. The text announces asset freezes and immigration and visa restrictions on members, associates and supporters of the groups, as well as criminal liability for those who knowingly provide material support, including logistics. The list includes Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV), Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Tren de Aragua, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the Sinaloa Cartel, according to CNN Brasil. The declaration was signed by Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the United States, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago. The signatories declared their intention to ask the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) for a consultation meeting to create a consultative body under Articles 6 and 13 of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (the Rio Treaty), according to CNN Brasil. The push came from US President Donald Trump, and Brazil’s government disputes the designation of the factions as terrorists, according to G1. The Americas Shield was founded in March 2026 on Trump’s initiative and, until this Tuesday, gathered governments aligned with Washington in Latin America, according to Veja.
A report by the Climate Impact Lab, a research group at the University of Chicago, released on Wednesday, 23 September 2026, estimates that El Niño-driven heat could cause as many as 451,000 additional heat-related deaths between June 2026 and the end of February 2027, compared with deaths expected in a typical year, according to the Associated Press. The Sahel is expected to be the hardest-hit region, with about 66,800 additional deaths. The report also projects about 19,400 additional heat deaths combined across the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, 19,300 in Indonesia, 15,800 in India and 13,300 in Brazil, according to AP. The study combined seasonal temperature forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) with local estimates of how heat affects mortality across more than 24,000 regions worldwide. Michael Greenstone, a co-founder of the group and co-author of the study, told AP the danger is likely to persist beyond February, when the current El Niño is expected to have ended.
China published on Wednesday, 23 September 2026, a set of guidelines for handling criminal cases involving fentanyl-related substances, according to The Hindu. The document is a joint statement by China’s Supreme People’s Court, Supreme People’s Procuratorate and Ministry of Public Security: it sets quantitative criteria for conviction and sentencing and divides the substances into medicinal and non-pharmaceutical categories. The authorities will investigate smuggling, trafficking, transportation, manufacturing, illegal possession and the use of the internet in such crimes. On Tuesday, 22 September 2026, China also added two chemicals to its export control list for drug precursors, requiring permits for shipments to the United States, Mexico and Canada, according to the Associated Press. That brings the number of chemicals under the regime to 18. Both measures come on the eve of the expected meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in Washington, according to The Hindu.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado tried three times in 24 hours to return to Venezuela and was unable to enter the country, according to The Straits Times, which carries a Bloomberg report, and Deutsche Welle. She set out from Panama, where she is in exile, and the attempts included a boat and flights to the Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curaçao, from where she would continue by sea, according to Bloomberg. The Vente Venezuela party confirmed the attempt was thwarted and did not identify who blocked it, according to Deutsche Welle. Pedro Urruchurtu, an adviser to Machado, said on social media that the latest sea and air attempts are among seven failed efforts to return since she left the country clandestinely nine months ago, according to Reuters. The main opposition coalition, the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), demanded respect for Machado’s right to return and expressed “firm solidarity” with her, according to Deutsche Welle. The Venezuelan government considers Machado a fugitive and accuses her of calling for military intervention in the country, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). The attempts came on the same day acting president Delcy Rodríguez met US President Donald Trump in New York.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, in New York that trade negotiations with India are making “good progress” and that the two countries aim to conclude them by the Group of 20 (G20) summit, scheduled for December 14-15, 2026 in Miami, according to the The Hindu. Carney said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has confirmed plans to visit Canada around that time, though no date has been set. Carney has said he wants to double Canada’s non-US trade over the next decade, and the talks with India are part of that push to reduce dependence on Washington amid deteriorating relations under Donald Trump’s administration, according to ANI. Negotiations were formally relaunched in March 2026, after the 2023 diplomatic rupture over the killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia.
Hurricane Polo intensified into a Category 5 storm in the Pacific off southwestern Mexico on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, with maximum winds of 180 mph, and is expected to remain “extremely dangerous” over the coming days, according to the National Hurricane Center, as cited by the Los Angeles Times. The center issued tropical storm warnings for portions of Mexico’s coast, with risks of heavy rainfall, flooding and mudslides through Thursday, September 24, 2026. Polo is the 16th named storm of the eastern Pacific season, in a year when El Niño is forecast to be the strongest in at least a generation; in California, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency on Monday, September 21, 2026, to prepare the state for high surf and winter storms, with the immediate concern being high tides coinciding with heavy swell next Monday, September 28, 2026, and the following day.
United States President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that his administration “strongly supports” the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) as a way to move the region’s energy infrastructure away from chokepoints under Iranian control. Speaking to Gulf Cooperation Council leaders on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, Trump said: “Iran’s terrorist attacks on commercial shipping in neighboring countries have shown the need to shift Middle East energy infrastructure away from the Iranian checkpoints. That’s why my administration strongly supports the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor and other places in the form of getting oil out, whether it’s pipelines or anything else,” according to the Hindustan Times and ANI. Launched on September 9, 2023 at the Group of 20 (G20) summit in New Delhi, the corridor is meant to connect India to the Gulf and the Gulf to Europe by sea, rail and road.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the choice of the next United Nations secretary-general cannot come down to “pure arithmetic” and that consultations among the five permanent members of the Security Council will be required, according to TASS. Kirill Logvinov, head of the international organisations department at the Russian ministry, told the agency that after the September 18, 2026 indicative vote, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett of Guyana, Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica and Olara Otunnu of Uganda were leading, but that each has between five and seven votes against, and that Moscow expects full-fledged consultations among the five to begin soon. According to [The Guardian]({GUARDA_ONU}), three rounds of secret balloting have not produced a clear frontrunner: the winner needs nine votes from the 15 council members and no veto from any permanent member, and António Guterres’s term ends on December 31, 2026.
Three commodity vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, below the 10-day moving average of about 15, according to preliminary Kpler data cited by Reuters and carried by Middle East Eye. All three were exiting the waterway, and the figure may change because some ships switch off their transponders on the crossing; the ballast liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Al Mafyar reappeared inside the strait on Tuesday, after last being seen outside it on 19 September 2026, according to Kpler and LSEG data. At Bab el-Mandeb, 22 commodity vessels crossed on the same day, against an average of about 26 over the previous 10 days. Before the US–Iran war that began on 28 February 2026, the strait handled about 125 large commercial vessels a day — the equivalent of a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas. Maritime risk consultancy Marisks said on Tuesday that the Isle of Man-flagged crude oil tanker LR Stephanie was struck by an unidentified projectile while entering the waterway on Monday, 21 September 2026, injuring two crew members, and that the Liberia-flagged liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) carrier Al Maryah, managed by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), was struck while outbound on Sunday, 20 September 2026; neither incident has been claimed, according to the Reuters dispatch.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said the contact with the United States on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) was carried out through a Qatari mediator, and that its purpose was to convey Iran’s conditions: an end to the war on all fronts, a halt to US military actions and the naval blockade, an end to the economic war and the release of the country’s frozen assets, according to Mehr News. According to The Guardian, the three-hour meeting between Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US envoy Steve Witkoff was mediated by Qatari diplomats and was attended for most of its duration by Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani; Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian addresses the General Assembly on Wednesday, 23 September 2026.
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, in New York that he does not support the deal transferring sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, calling the agreement “terrible” and “ridiculous,” according to The Guardian. The remarks came at his first meeting with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), where Trump said relations with London were “more up” than with predecessor Keir Starmer and called Burnham “a natural businessperson.” His harshest words were for Chagos: “I don’t support it. I think it’s terrible. It was a terrible deal,” he said, adding that the prime minister is going to be “looking at it,” according to the Jerusalem Post and the Associated Press (AP). Under the agreement, the United Kingdom gives up sovereignty over the archipelago to Mauritius and leases Diego Garcia for 99 years, keeping a joint military base with the United States there; ratification has been stalled since April 2026, when the US administration withdrew its support, and London had refused to let the United States use the base for its first strikes on Iran in February, according to the Press Association.
22 Sep
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi used her first address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, to call for an overhaul of the organization, including the removal of a 1940s-era clause that refers to Japan as an “enemy state” and that China has invoked in its row with Tokyo, according to The Japan Times. Takaichi said the UN has “never been more important” and “must be reborn as a ‘more resilient and effective United Nations’” to regain the trust of the international community, 70 years after Japan’s admission in 1956. In a meeting with Secretary-General António Guterres, she raised Security Council reform, according to the official UN readout carried by IANS. Japan is part of the Group of Four (G4) with Brazil, Germany and India, which back each other’s bids for permanent seats on an expanded Council.
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, in New York that Canada is giving C$100 million in international assistance for Palestine: C$80 million in humanitarian aid and C$20 million for peace and security capacity building, according to Politico and Reuters. Carney made the pledge on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), ahead of a meeting with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan on the two-state solution and the implementation of Security Council Resolution 2803, the U.S.-backed plan to end the regional conflict. He criticized Israel’s planned expansion of the E1 settlement in the West Bank and said Canada had restricted imports of goods produced in Israeli settlements.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, in his debut at the United Nations General Assembly, that violence in Gaza and Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank were pushing the two-state solution towards a “point of no return”, according to Middle East Eye. Burnham cited the E1 settlement project, which he said would sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank, and urged action to match the international support states declare for a Palestinian state. The speech came two weeks after Britain, France and Canada announced, on September 8, 2026, sanctions on goods from Israeli settlements, to which Israel responded by ordering the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem within 30 days, according to France 24.
US federal prosecutors are investigating whether Binance violated sanctions on Iran by failing to stop certain trading on its platform, according to Bloomberg Law, which cited people familiar with the matter, and Reuters, which confirmed the account with its own source. The inquiry is led by the Manhattan US attorney’s office, with the Justice Department’s criminal division in Washington also involved, and it examines whether the crypto exchange knowingly allowed the trading. Both offices declined to comment; Binance said it has a “zero-tolerance” approach to sanctions violations and that it cooperates with law enforcement. On September 14, 2026, the same office sought the forfeiture of about US$ 61 million in crypto that, according to prosecutors, came from black-market Iranian oil sales, in an action filed against the assets, with no accusation against the exchange. Binance paid a US$ 4.3 billion penalty in 2023 over money-laundering and sanctions controls, when the Justice Department calculated that more than US$ 898 million in trades had flowed between US users and users ordinarily resident in Iran from January 2018 through May 2022.
France’s government announced on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, a €450 million aid package to blunt a fuel price surge that pushed the average diesel price to €2.39 a litre. The spending lifts the state’s total for the year to €1.4 billion, Budget Minister David Amiel said. The main measure doubles, from €0.20 to €0.40 a litre, the subsidy for low-income workers who drive for a living and expands the number of beneficiaries from 3 million to 5.5 million, government spokesperson Maud Bregeon said. The tax-exempt ceiling on the fuel allowance employers can pay rises from €600 to €1,000 a year. Aid to fishing, farming and construction was extended to 31 December 2026, and fishermen who blocked Mediterranean ports last week will have up to 70% of their cost increase covered, plus access to zero-interest loans. Economy and Finance Minister Roland Lescure said there was no concern about supplies over the next two months. The surge stems from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz since the United States and Israel bombed Iran in February 2026, according to Politico and the Xinhua news agency, in a dispatch carried by Big News Network.
The UN Human Rights Office documented 1,004 cases of sexual violence against civilians and prisoners of war in Ukraine between 24 February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, and the end of July 2026, according to the report the office published on 18 September 2026 and G1’s account. Of the total, 89 percent of the cases were attributed to Russian authorities, including members of the armed forces, the prison service and the national security service, and 11 percent to Ukrainian authorities. Most of the victims were men, particularly in places of detention, and the documented violations include gang rape, genital mutilation, electric shocks and beatings to the genitals and other degrading acts of a sexual nature. The youngest rape survivor was four years old and the oldest 82; both were perpetrated by Russian authorities. Many of the men reported electric shocks to the genitals with a Soviet-era military field telephone known as a “tapik”, a method used in 155 cases, or 27 percent of the total, against Ukrainian prisoners of war and retained medical personnel. Almost half of the violations attributed to Ukrainian authorities against Russian or third-country prisoners of war consisted of threats of sexual violence. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said Russia, “given the high prevalence of cases attributed to its forces”, must take concrete steps to protect civilians and prisoners of war from all forms of torture, and called on both countries to investigate all credible claims. Investigators interviewed about 10 percent of the prisoners released by both sides and never had access to Russian-controlled territory, Danielle Bell, head of the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine, told G1.
More than a year after they were deported from the United States and sent to El Salvador under an agreement neither government ever made public, 11 Salvadoran men are still unaccounted for, and their families are demanding to know where they are being held, according to an investigation by the consortium The Deportation Project, coordinated by Forbidden Stories, which includes RFI and G1. The men arrived in San Salvador on military flights chartered by Donald Trump’s administration between March and April 2025, on the same aircraft that carried 252 Venezuelans, all of them presented by both governments as dangerous criminals. They were taken to the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), the maximum-security prison built during Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on the country’s gangs, and held incommunicado, without a lawyer and without a legal process. The Venezuelans were sent home four months later; the Salvadorans remained in detention. Rights groups later established that 36 Salvadorans had been on those flights, and families have identified 11 of them. The terms of the deal emerged in September 2025, when documents from the Trump administration surfaced in a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Democracy Forward: Washington had agreed to pay El Salvador $4.76 million to hold Venezuelan and Salvadoran deportees at Cecot. Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that only 10 percent of the Salvadorans had records in the United States for violent or potentially violent crimes. In June 2026, El Salvador confirmed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that Elmer Concepcion Romero Janes, one of the 11, was being held incommunicado at Santa Ana prison, without saying what he was accused of, and prosecutors gave his family a certificate stating that he has no criminal record in El Salvador. Lawyers representing nine of the 11 identified families filed a complaint against the Salvadoran state for enforced disappearance. “The crime starts in the United States and continues in El Salvador,” said Kelvi Zambrano, one of those lawyers. El Salvador’s government did not respond to requests for access to the prisons or to the consortium’s questions.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to the United States from 23 to 25 September 2026 at the invitation of President Donald Trump, according to the announcement by China’s foreign ministry carried by Reuters. Xi arrives on the afternoon of Wednesday, 23 September, at Joint Base Andrews, where Trump will greet him on the tarmac; the arrival ceremony on the White House South Lawn, with 479 members of the United States Armed Forces, the military review in the Rose Garden and the state dinner are set for Thursday, 24 September, according to the White House. It is the first state visit by a Chinese president to the United States in 11 years, according to ABC News, which lists artificial intelligence (AI), tariffs, rare earths, technology and agricultural trade on the agenda. Beijing presents the trip as the consolidation of the “constructive relationship of strategic stability” agreed at the May meeting in Beijing and notes that it closes an exchange of visits between the two presidents within six months, according to the State Council of China. For Scott Kennedy, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, the most likely outcome is an extension of the trade ceasefire struck at the Busan summit in October 2025, which expires on 10 November, with deals on specific goods such as agricultural products and Boeing aircraft: “most of this will be theatre,” he told ABC News.
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) President Ilan Goldfajn is working to secure approval for a US$ 2.5 billion loan to Venezuela and has faced pushback from part of the lender’s board, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter who spoke to Reuters. Board members raised concern about lending to Caracas without the parallel work of other multilateral lenders that would ensure the country’s capacity to repay, even though they recognise the benefits of re-engaging with Venezuela, one of the sources said. The IDB has made no new loans to the country since May 2018, when Venezuela fell behind on payments, and Caracas owes more than US$ 2 billion in overdue principal and interest to the bank. The operation would fall under a Special Development Lending (SDL) arrangement, which for Venezuela is capped at US$ 500 million under the bank’s rules, and would require a size waiver and a second waiver for the absence of a standing programme with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Any proposal needs the approval of the IDB’s 14-member executive board, where the United States holds 30% of the voting power, followed by Argentina and Brazil with 11.35% each. Goldfajn told Reuters on Monday, 21 September, that the IDB is working on an “engagement note” with Venezuela, a short-term plan that typically precedes new lending. The bank declined to comment, and the Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for comment.
Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said Spain intends to comply with the European Union’s ban on importing Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) from 1 January 2027 despite long-term contracts held by Spanish companies, according to TASS, the Russian state news agency, which carried his remarks at an Atlantic Council event in Washington. “LNG supply contracts are concluded years in advance. These are very long-term contracts. This is not something that can be decided at the last minute,” Albares said. He added that Spain has one of Europe’s largest LNG storage and processing capacities and that this “opens up opportunities for the rest of Europe,” which Madrid can supply with LNG from “reliable partners, such as the United States.” The European ban on Russian LNG imports takes effect on 1 January 2027 for long-term contracts, and the ban on pipeline gas on 30 September 2027; the European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER), in a 2026 report, records that Russian LNG imports rose 17% year-on-year between 18 March and the end of May 2026, despite the ban on short-term contracts in force since 25 April.
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, at the 81st United Nations General Assembly that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) will watch artificial intelligence (AI) closely and could rein the sector in if needed, according to Reuters. “We’re going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice,” he said. According to CNBC, Trump said the government will rein things in if necessary, that he is “not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution,” and that the United States leads the AI race “over China by a lot.” He also said US government documents will henceforth use the term “super intelligence” instead of artificial intelligence, according to Reuters. The speech came after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, saying that “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”; Trump has dismissed such warnings as a “hoax,” according to Reuters.
Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura terminal recorded its busiest loading day since before the war on September 21, 2026, as six very large crude carriers loaded close to 12 million barrels at Ras Tanura and Juaymah, according to shipping analytics firm Kpler, as reported by Middle East Eye. The surge followed disruption to Aramco’s East-West pipeline, which lets Saudi crude reach the Red Sea coast without passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Kpler said some of the six vessels had already been flagged over the previous six weeks for undeclared ship-to-ship transfers or unusual port calls, which the firm says points to a longer-running pattern of changing vessel behaviour.
US President Donald Trump met Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in New York on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, their first encounter since the US military operation that captured Nicolás Maduro in January, according to G1, which cited Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP). The talks took place on the sidelines of a reception Trump hosted for foreign leaders during the UN General Assembly; Venezuela’s delegation, which includes the oil minister and representatives of state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), is pitching the country as a destination for investment in energy, mining and public debt. Trump again called Maduro an “outlaw dictator” and cited the oil deal struck with Caracas last month, which he described as “maybe the biggest deal ever made”. The same day, the opposition party Vente Venezuela said María Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, tried three times in the previous hours to return home — by boat from Panama and on flights to Aruba and Curaçao — and was blocked each time, bringing the total to seven failed attempts, according to the Spanish news agency EFE, in a report carried by ABC Color, and NTN24’s correspondent. Machado has been in Panama City since leaving Venezuela in December 2025 to collect the prize in Norway.
Iran’s state news agency, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), said an explosion was heard near Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz on the night of Tuesday, 22 September 2026, and that the cause and the impact were not immediately clear, according to Middle East Eye, which is covering the case in a live blog. No other source has confirmed the explosion so far.
Oil prices fell on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, on expectations that Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and that Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline is back in service, then erased much of the drop after US President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly he believes a deal with Iran is possible after November’s midterm elections. Brent, the benchmark for two thirds of the world’s oil, fell 2.64 per cent to $97.69 a barrel at 3.09pm UAE time, while West Texas Intermediate dropped 3.20 per cent, according to The National, of Abu Dhabi. Earlier, Brent had fallen 3 per cent to $97.43 and US crude as much as 3.5 per cent to $92.40, according to NBC News. After Trump’s speech, US crude was back around $96 and Brent briefly rose above $100 again, NBC News reported. “I believe we will make a deal right after the election because it does not make sense for them not to,” Trump told the assembly. “Oil prices will come plummeting down, even lower than they were at the start of the conflict.” Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency called the reports about the reopening of Hormuz “unreliable and untrue”, according to NBC News, which says it has not confirmed them. Only two visible commercial vessels crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, 21 September 2026, against about 125 a day before the war began on 28 February 2026, according to preliminary shipping data cited by The National. The US national average diesel price hit a record on Tuesday at $6.52 a gallon, up 82 per cent since the start of the year, according to NBC News.
Spain’s Council of Ministers on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, allowed a US extradition request against activist and donor James Cox Chambers Jr., known as Fergie Chambers, 41, to move to the judicial phase, a decision his defence calls a “dangerous precedent” for the Palestinian cause, according to Middle East Eye. Chambers was arrested in Ibiza on 10 July 2026 at Washington’s request and remains in pre-trial detention in Madrid. The sealed indictment charges him with international money laundering, riot and conspiracy to riot over transfers of about $7.5 million to a company in Tunisia and over 2023 protests at the US facilities of an Israeli arms manufacturer in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, according to The National and The Straits Times, which published a Reuters dispatch. It is the first time the US has sought the extradition of a citizen over alleged support for Hamas, The National says. Government spokesperson Elma Saiz said the decision was “purely procedural” and that the final word rests with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s cabinet, after review by the Audiencia Nacional, the Spanish court that handles extradition requests. Chambers’s lead counsel, Baltasar Garzón, said: “Spain cannot defend international law, the rights of the Palestinian people and the protection of those who provide humanitarian aid while at the same time allowing a request to proceed with an extradition that shows clear signs of political persecution by the US government.” The Sumar party, a junior partner in the governing coalition, had urged the government to block the request; Podemos lawmaker Ione Belarra called Chambers “the first political prisoner in Spanish history being imprisoned because of his support for Palestine”. His defence says the transfers funded humanitarian projects in Gaza, including a bakery and a medical clinic.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, criticised French President Emmanuel Macron’s claim at the United Nations General Assembly that Hamas has never operated in the West Bank. “The grotesque absurdity of Emmanuel Macron’s statement is staggering,” the statement said, as carried by Middle East Eye and the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS). The statement cites the killing of Netanel Shukrun, a French citizen and father of six, who it says was shot dead in his car by a “Hamas terrorist” on Sunday, 20 September 2026, the eve of Yom Kippur, in the occupied West Bank — the region the Israeli government calls Judea and Samaria. “With his final breath, he told his son to run,” it says. “Hamas terrorists carry out attacks against Jews almost every day. They have murdered countless Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria.” Macron had called the scenes in Gaza “shameful. A shame for all of us”, and said that “all those who claim that Israel’s security requires violating the sovereignty of all its neighbours are making a fatal mistake”, according to Middle East Eye. Netanyahu is expected to address the UN on Thursday, 24 September 2026.
South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir dissolved the transitional unity government set up under the 2018 peace agreement on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, and appointed a caretaker administration to steer the country to its first national elections, scheduled for December 22, 2026, according to Radio Tamazuj and Al Jazeera. The republican order read out on state broadcaster South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation (SSBC) removed First Vice-President Riek Machar and all four vice-presidents, dissolved the Transitional National Legislative Assembly, the Council of States, the 10 state governments and the three administrative areas, and kept Kiir in office through the electoral period until a newly elected president is sworn in. The dissolution came a day after parliament passed amendments to the 2012 National Elections Act that dropped the requirement to complete a permanent constitution and a national census before the vote, two steps set out in the 2018 deal. The South Sudan Opposition Alliance rejected the changes for lack of consultation among the agreement’s signatories, and analysts told Agence France-Presse (AFP) the arrangement concentrates power in the president: “Kiir will be the only person in power, without vice-presidents, without the executive, without the parliament,” lawyer Michael Wani, a former member of the constitution-drafting committee, told AFP. Machar, Kiir’s longtime rival, remains under house arrest on charges including treason and murder, which he denies. Amnesty International called the decree a “decisive step” towards the country’s first election since independence in 2011 and urged the authorities to ensure a safe environment in which people can vote and stand for office.
Israeli restrictions have held up more than 900 wheelchairs donated by two Australian charities for children injured in Gaza, according to Australian public broadcaster ABC News, as reported by Middle East Eye. Two shipments from New South Wales-based Kids on Wheels Alliance reached Jordan in February 2025 and a third, from Western Australia’s Wheelchairs for Kids, arrived in October 2025; all three remain in warehouses run by the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organisation (JHCO). The JHCO says the block comes from the Israeli agency coordinating aid into Gaza, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), while an Israeli government source denied that an application for the Australian wheelchairs had been rejected. COGAT did not answer ABC’s specific questions about the Australian donations and said in a general response that it had let thousands of wheelchairs into the strip during the war.
European Union (EU) foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said she discussed with Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in New York the diplomatic prospects for ending the war between the United States and Iran and for fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz. “There were no tolls or fees for passage before the war, and there should be none after the war,” she wrote on X, according to LaPresse and ANI. “Navigation must be free and unimpeded, both in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.” Kallas also said she raised with Araghchi domestic repression inside Iran, including the sharp rise in executions and death sentences.
French President Emmanuel Macron used his final address to the United Nations General Assembly as head of state to urge countries to recommit to international law and the UN system against what he called a resurgence of the “law of the jungle.” According to Agence France-Presse (AFP) and The Hindu, he called for a “double moratorium” halting strikes on civilian and energy targets in the war between Russia and Ukraine: “We must protect the civilian population, and this is why we’d like to express our support for a double moratorium, a moratorium on strikes on energy and civilian infrastructure.” On Gaza, he said that “some claim that peace has been achieved, but this has not opened up humanitarian deliveries” — “a spectacle that shames us all,” as he put it. Macron also proposed that countries pool investment capacity to build an open-source frontier artificial intelligence (AI) model: “I don’t want anyone to become the vassal of one of the great powers,” he said.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York that Ukraine is ready for “any kind of format” of energy ceasefire with Russia as long as Moscow stops attacking Ukraine’s energy system. He said he does not know Russia’s position and hoped “the American side will find a way” to bring Moscow to any kind of negotiations, according to France 24, which carried the remarks with Agence France-Presse (AFP). Zelensky spoke after a 40-minute meeting with US President Donald Trump, which he described as “positive and productive” and about which he wrote on X that “both the US and Ukraine want to see this senseless Russian war ended before winter”, according to Arab News. In his account to reporters, he said a unilateral halt to Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries was not discussed, and that he is willing to take part in a trilateral meeting with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump had told reporters, before the meeting, that he and Zelensky would discuss Ukrainian attacks on refineries in Russia: “It is a serious hit on the Russians. It’s also a serious hit on the price of diesel,” he said, according to Reuters, in a dispatch carried by The Sacramento Bee. The previous week, the US president had said Russia and Ukraine had agreed not to strike each other’s energy infrastructure; no deal was confirmed and both sides kept up attacks in the following days, as reported by NBC News.
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that he backs banning US diesel exports, a step farm-state lawmakers have demanded as fuel costs soar: “I’ve said let’s not send out the diesel. We make a lot of diesel. I’ve called for it. I’ve called for it within my people,” he told reporters at United Nations headquarters in New York, ahead of a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to Reuters, in a dispatch carried by The Sacramento Bee. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the same meeting that the administration is examining whether a ban is feasible and whether a full or partial ban would work. Diesel prices have hit records in the United States and Europe because the wars in Iran and Ukraine have cut exports from some of the largest producers, such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; the average US pump price rose above $6.50 a gallon, a record, according to AAA as cited by Bloomberg. Trump’s backing puts him at odds with his own energy and interior secretaries. Chris Wright said a ban would create a glut of diesel on the Gulf Coast and push refiners to cut production, which would also reduce petrol supply, and argued for more supply. Doug Burgum said a ban would be unlikely to lower petroleum prices and could trigger retaliation from energy-exporting countries. A ban could ease prices on the Gulf Coast while tightening supplies further in Europe, which is structurally short of diesel and relies on US exports: “that would seem pretty damaging to some key U.S. allies,” said Jim Mitchell, director of oil trading analytics at consultancy Wood Mackenzie, according to Reuters.
Iran handed the United States its conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz in a meeting between Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US special envoy Steve Witkoff on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. According to Iran’s state broadcaster Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), in an account carried by The Tribune, the demands are the immediate lifting of the naval blockade, the release of frozen Iranian assets and an end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon. The meeting was requested by Witkoff, the broadcaster said. Witkoff wrote on X, in a post carried by The Tribune, that the two sides held “lengthy talks” through mediators who “shuttled between the two sides throughout the day”: “They successfully completed a round of discussions that we hope will prove constructive and promising. The mediators will continue their work.” Iran’s ambassador to Russia, Kazem Jalali, told the Vedomosti newspaper that Washington will have to accept the new legal status of the Strait of Hormuz, which he said will be defined by Iran and Oman, according to TASS.
The attorneys general of California, Rob Bonta, and New York, Letitia James, sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, over deals that buy back federal offshore wind leases. Bonta is challenging the removal of a project planned off the California coast by Chicago-based Invenergy; the administration said in June 2026 it would buy back the company’s US offshore wind leases for four projects on the east and west coasts. James is leading seven states in suits seeking to block the Invenergy deal and a separate proposal with Bluepoint Wind, which agreed in April to end a wind farm under development off the New York and New Jersey coast, according to The Associated Press, in a dispatch published by The Guardian. The deals would hand energy companies about $1.4 billion in taxpayer money in exchange for cancelling multiple projects, and the administration has pledged nearly $4 billion to companies to walk away from projects across the country. James called the deals illegal and said they will raise electricity bills: “Americans are facing increasing energy costs because this administration would rather pay off energy companies than let us build the new power sources we need.” Attorneys general from Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Vermont joined New York’s suit.
Jamaica’s culture minister, Olivia Grange, told the country’s House of Representatives on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that King Charles III has referred Jamaica’s slavery reparations petition to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The petition was filed on 7 September 2026 on behalf of the Jamaican people, according to the Jamaica Gleaner and The Guardian. The petition asked the King, who remains Jamaica’s head of state, to seek an advisory opinion from the country’s highest court on three questions: whether the enslavement of Africans in Jamaica was lawful under English common law, whether it breached international law, and whether the United Kingdom has a legal obligation to provide a remedy. Grange described the decision as a “really big deal”, according to The Guardian. Jamaica is now awaiting directions from the Privy Council on the next steps in the case, and the country’s attorney general is preparing to handle it, according to the Jamaica Gleaner. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which advises the British monarch, is the final court of appeal for Jamaica and other Commonwealth countries.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that a failure of Morocco’s border controls was to blame for the mass entry of migrants into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta. He said Spain was investigating what happened in July and had asked Rabat for “actions and also for answers because it is also clear that its border control failed”, in an interview with the US broadcaster CNN in New York, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Le Monde. More than 70,000 migrants entered Ceuta on 30 and 31 July 2026 in an unprecedented and deadly rush, AFP reported. Most returned to Morocco in the following hours; several thousand remained in the enclave, where the situation has since deteriorated, leading to episodes of violence and almost daily demonstrations by residents. A Spanish police report seen by AFP said the number of Moroccan police officers around the border crossing was “clearly smaller than usual” and that officers “made no serious attempt” to stem the surge, based on satellite images, open-source videos and testimonies from migrants. Speaking in parliament on 3 September 2026, Sánchez had said Madrid needed to ask Morocco for “explanations and changes” to avoid a repeat, while stressing there was no “solid proof” that Morocco had orchestrated the influx, according to AFP and Le Monde.
China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) is investigating whether DeepSeek and Moonshot AI sent sensitive domestic data to Anthropic servers in the United States, The Information reported, in a story cited by NDTV Profit and Yahoo Finance. The regulator summoned representatives of the seven Chinese companies named in Anthropic’s September threat report (DeepSeek, Moonshot, Alibaba, Zhipu, SenseTime, MiniMax and Xiaomi) before narrowing its focus to the first two, and has announced no penalties. Anthropic, which brought the allegation, says the seven Chinese labs accessed its Claude model illicitly to extract capabilities: according to the company, Moonshot routed nearly 300,000 customer requests through 5,380 fraudulent accounts over 10 days and displayed the answers as though they came from its own Kimi model, while DeepSeek rerouted more than 12.1 million exchanges over 14 days in July. Anthropic says some of that traffic contained sensitive material, including surveillance footage from cameras in Chengdu and data from a case-management system at a municipal public security bureau. The Chinese companies deny the allegations, which Beijing describes as an attack on its AI sector.
US President Donald Trump told CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins as he entered United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York on Tuesday morning, 22 September 2026: “You should not be here covering me. You said you weren’t going to cover me.” Collins had asked when the war with Iran would end, citing a poll that found two-thirds of Americans do not think the country is winning the conflict, and replied that the UN had credentialed the network for the event, according to CNBC, The Guardian and USA Today. The exchange came after Trump announced on Friday, 18 September 2026, that he was revoking the White House credentials of three outlets — CNN itself, MS NOW and Politico — accusing them, without pointing to specific stories, of reporting “FICTION and LIES”. The ban took effect on Saturday, 19 September, when Secret Service officers, the federal agency that protects the president, seized the press passes of journalists from the three outlets. On Monday, 21 September, the three companies sued in federal court in Washington, alleging a violation of the First Amendment; US District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, ordered the Justice Department to respond to the request for an injunction and scheduled a teleconference hearing for Wednesday, 23 September. Of the five television networks that share White House pool coverage — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC — four decided to suspend the pool, according to CNBC.
DeepSeek is among the companies invited to brief the United Nations Security Council this week on the risks posed by artificial intelligence, according to two sources familiar with the matter cited by Reuters, in a dispatch carried by The Straits Times. The 15-member council meets on Wednesday, 23 September 2026, to discuss AI and international security. The meeting is convened by France, which holds the council presidency this month, and will include OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman as well as senior Anthropic representatives, according to The Next Web. DeepSeek and other Chinese companies, including Moonshot, have been invited to make statements; DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng does not plan to attend, and the plan could still change. The Security Council first discussed the risks of AI in 2023, when China warned the technology should not become a “runaway horse”. UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned last week that rapidly advancing AI poses risks that cannot be ignored, a position at odds with US President Donald Trump, who argues existing safeguards are sufficient. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday, 21 September 2026, that the two countries agreed to hold further talks on AI safety, ahead of Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping expected this week in Washington.
The United States, Denmark and Greenland signed on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, a security agreement that expands the US military presence on the island. The signing took place on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York, by Donald Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen. According to Reuters, in a dispatch carried by The Jerusalem Post, the text authorises bases at Narsarsuaq in the south and Mestersvig in the east, expands the Pituffik base, which serves as a missile early-warning site, and lets US aircraft overfly, land and operate anywhere in Greenland, including its territorial waters and undersea space. No non-NATO country may keep a “persistent” military presence without unanimous approval by all three parties. The deal has no expiry date and amends the 1951 defence treaty. Trump said the agreement gives the United States “permanent control over security and all other needs” on the territory, and that no adversary will be allowed to establish a military presence there. Frederiksen said the text respects “the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark, as well as Greenland’s right to self-determination”, according to Al Jazeera, which quoted Nielsen saying “it is vital to keep NATO strong”. The deal ends months of standoff after Trump refused to rule out military or economic force to take the island, triggering a diplomatic crisis inside the alliance in January 2026. The US military presence in Greenland shrank from 17 installations and more than 10,000 personnel during the Cold War to about 200 at Pituffik.
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington on Wednesday, 23 September 2026, for a three-day state visit, with formal talks scheduled for Thursday, 24 September, and a visit to the US National Archives on Friday, 25 September, and is expected to press President Donald Trump to halt arms sales to Taiwan, invoking the third of the joint communiqués the two countries signed in 1982, according to Reuters, which spoke to three sources familiar with the discussions. In that communiqué, Washington said it intended to gradually reduce arms sales to Taiwan and did not seek long-term weapons sales to Taipei; an accompanying memorandum by then president Ronald Reagan conditioned that willingness on China’s continued commitment to a peaceful solution of differences over Taiwan. A package worth about US$ 14 billion in arms for Taiwan has been on hold for months. After the summit with Xi in Beijing in May 2026, Trump said he was keeping the package in abeyance and described it as “a very good negotiating chip”, according to Reuters. The sources said China has also asked the United States to stop deliveries of weapons already ordered by the island, and has offered help in pressing Iran over the war in the Middle East in exchange for concessions. The South China Morning Post, citing sources, reported that Washington is weighing postponing the announcement of new arms sales to Taiwan until after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen in November and the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Florida in December; one source said Trump considered delaying the decision until late 2028 or January 2029 but backed off after loud opposition from China hawks. In Taipei, Le Monde quoted Su Tzu-yun, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research: “We need to stay alert, but not panic, because the United States’ geopolitical interest remains keeping China at arm’s length from Taiwan.” Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry said it was closely monitoring the talks.
In his debut at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham accused Russia of an “industrial-scale assault” on the information environment and of trying to interfere in the United Kingdom’s 2019 general election: “Russian agencies have used every means at their disposal to spread lies and disinformation and prey on people’s fear. They’ve used bots and fake websites. Falsified newspaper articles. Forged the branding of 28 British organisations — including universities and the BBC,” he said, according to the Daily Express and Al Jazeera. Burnham said the Kremlin spends around £ 1.3 billion each year on manipulating information and announced a new National Centre for Information Defence to detect, attribute and disrupt hostile state information attacks and identify deepfakes damaging British interests, according to Reuters, in a report published by the Global Banking & Finance Review. The body starts out under the prime minister’s office and will work with intelligence agencies, government departments, the police and social media companies, according to the Daily Express. The prime minister said the United Kingdom has already supported Moldova in protecting its elections from Russian interference and that the country is ready to lead an international effort to set standards for artificial intelligence (AI).
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that Washington and Tehran are moving toward a settlement, hours after repeating at the UN General Assembly his threat to annihilate Iran if no deal is reached: “They want to talk to us. They have been talking to us, even today they’ve been talking to us, and the relationship is developing. But we can’t let them — and they understand that — we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,” he said after meeting British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, according to Reuters, in a dispatch carried by Al-Monitor. A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran could reopen the Strait of Hormuz to Gulf shipping within seven days if the United States eases military pressure and lifts its blockade of Iranian ports, and that Tehran’s latest proposal was conveyed to Washington through mediators last week. “The UN General Assembly is a golden opportunity for the US to return to diplomacy,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who headed the negotiating team in earlier talks, warned that “Trump must understand that he cannot impose his power on the Iranian people and its armed forces”. Trump also hosted the leaders of the six Arab Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) on the same day, telling the meeting there is “a lot of momentum” for a deal, according to TASS: “We’ve been mediating for a while, but I think there’s a lot of momentum for them to make a deal.” According to sources cited by Reuters, Saudi Arabia restarted operations at its East-West Pipeline and could resume exports from the Red Sea port of Yanbu within hours, at reduced volumes; the pipeline had been shut after attacks this month that Riyadh blamed on Iran-backed groups in Iraq.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that European countries hosting US military bases or helping to prepare or execute US attacks could be “complicit in aggression”. He made the remark to his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, according to Middle East Eye, which cites an Iranian statement. Araghchi said rising fuel and commodity prices in global markets are a direct result of the US-Israeli war on Iran and warned of “the dangerous consequences that the normalisation of law-breaking and aggressive US unilateralism poses to the rule of law”.
United Nations (UN) secretary-general António Guterres used his final address to the General Assembly on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, to call for regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), an end to wars and an overhaul of multilateral institutions, which he said “continue to reflect the power realities and interests of a largely bygone age”. “The fault lines in our world are widening,” he said, citing wars, rising temperatures and AI, and called for “a world built on interdependence”, according to France 24 and Business Day. He urged the countries leading the technological revolution to “share information on emerging safety risks, co-operate on testing and evaluation, and work towards common safeguards” and backed “a multilateral AI risk management framework, supported by credible and independent oversight”. He told the great powers to recognise “that their power isn’t so super” and said “military power alone cannot secure peace”. On the Middle East, he called for “de-escalation and dialogue”: “The fighting must stop. Humanitarian aid must flow. And navigational rights and freedoms must be fully restored in accordance with international law.” Guterres leaves office on 31 December 2026, at the end of his second five-year term, and drew a standing ovation as he defended a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians and said “polluters must pay”.
US president Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, in his address to the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly that he has “a big decision to make” on Iran: whether to reach a deal that lets the country “rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before”, or to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again”. He called on “all nations” to help enforce the “complete economic isolation of Iran” and said a deal is likely to come after the US midterm elections of 3 November 2026, according to The Guardian and Quartz. Trump said Iran is “waiting to see how I do in the midterm election” and dismissed the idea that the vote would shape his decision: “What they don’t realize is that I’m not running. I did that already, and won in a landslide.” He also said the United States has “more munitions than we could ever possibly even think of using”, and defended the war on Iran as a way to keep Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
A United States Air Force F-16 crashed on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, near Spangdahlem Air Base in Rhineland-Palatinate, western Germany, and the pilot ejected before impact, according to the base’s statement carried by the Associated Press and Deutsche Welle. The aircraft, an F-16 Fighting Falcon assigned to the 52nd Fighter Wing, went down at about 2:30 p.m. local time (8:30 a.m. UTC-4), and the cause is under investigation. “The pilot ejected safely and is receiving medical care,” the base said. The Eifel district of Bitburg-Prüm said one person was injured and sent emergency crews to the site. Germany’s air traffic control authority said four F-16s were taking part in a training exercise and that one of the two returning to the base crashed on approach, according to GV Wire; the others landed at Ramstein Air Base, according to India Today. Spangdahlem is home to an F-16 squadron of about 20 aircraft. The crash comes five days after another F-16, from the Texas Air National Guard, went down in Michigan on September 17, 2026, during a training mission, according to Quartz.
US president Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that his administration is studying whether to apply the law expanding sanctions on Russia and Iran, which he signed on 18 September 2026 and which is known as the “hell sanctions” bill: “That’s something we’re certainly studying. It’s a very severe bill,” he told reporters before his meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, according to TASS. Asked whether he intended to raise secondary sanctions on Russia’s trading partners in his meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, set for this week in Washington, Trump replied: “Probably.” The law, chiefly authored by senator Lindsey Graham, who died on 11 July 2026, provides for tariffs of up to 100% on the five largest buyers of Russian oil and gas and secondary sanctions on countries that help Moscow evade the measures, as well as restrictions on Russia’s political and military leadership, state banks and the “shadow fleet” of oil tankers.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese denied on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that his government’s digital duty of care law amounts to state control, saying its purpose is to give people “back control over what they received on their devices,” after the US administration warned the proposal risked becoming “viewpoint-based censorship” and asked for American platforms to be exempt, according to The Guardian. Albanese, who told the UN General Assembly that sovereignty “must have a digital dimension,” is meeting President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the assembly. In Australia, NetChoice, whose members include Meta, TikTok, X, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitch and YouTube, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have applied to join the High Court challenge in which Reddit is contesting the law banning social media accounts for under-16s, in force since December 2025, according to Politico. Platforms have removed or suspended 1 million accounts because of the Australian law, and the government has yet to file its formal defence in the case.
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, branded Yemen’s Houthis a “terrorist militia” and condemned the attempt to target Mecca, describing it as a “heinous crime” and “a provocation to Muslims around the world”, according to Al Jazeera and Dawn, which published the report by the French news agency AFP. He spoke at a cabinet meeting in Jeddah, recorded by the Saudi Press Agency, the kingdom’s official news agency: a rare intervention by the 90-year-old monarch, who has left day-to-day affairs to his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi Arabia says it intercepted a Houthi drone headed for Mecca on 15 September 2026, which Al Jazeera records as the first time a security alert had been activated in the city in nearly 10 years. Houthi leader Abdel-Malik al-Houthi denied the attack and called the Saudi accusation “a heinous lie”. Since then, Houthi missiles and drones have hit Saudi cities and energy infrastructure: the Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted a ballistic missile fired at Riyadh on 19 September 2026, sending a dark column of smoke from a fuel storage area at King Khalid International Airport.
According to the UN’s official record of the debate and Middle East Eye, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opened the general debate of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) saying that “generations of Palestinians will carry the pain and trauma left by the genocide of women and children perpetrated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Gaza.” In the same speech, on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, Lula said that “Israeli civilians paid the price for the radicalism and intolerance of Hamas’ terrorist acts” and that illegal settlements in the West Bank are making a two-state solution increasingly unviable, according to The New Republic. He criticised the persecution of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its members and said that the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, must not be “silenced for telling the truth,” according to Al Jazeera, The New Republic and Israel Hayom.
Austin police on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, released video of the response to the shooting of Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, a Venezuelan man wounded by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent on Sunday, September 20, while he was delivering for DoorDash. The footage, presented at a news conference by Police Chief Lisa Davis, shows agents approaching Garcés Pérez and first responders treating him, but not the moment the agent fired, according to CBS Austin. The ICE officer who fired had been issued a body camera but was not wearing it, according to two Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials who spoke to NBC News; a second agent’s camera in the same vehicle captured partial footage that does not include the shooting. Attorney Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch said her client returned to a hospital with severe pain and difficulty moving his left arm before being taken back to the Pearsall detention centre, with the bullet still lodged in his back, according to CNN. Austin police’s special investigations unit is examining the case alongside the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Airports in Baghdad, Iraq, and Muscat, Oman, stopped accepting flights by Iranian carriers from midnight on Wednesday, 23 September 2026, when United States sanctions on Iran’s aviation sector took effect. The information comes from Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency, cited by Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse (AFP). Iraq’s government ordered its civil aviation authority to suspend Iranian flights to Baghdad, according to two sources heard by Reuters, and is considering rerouting those services to Najaf, a pilgrimage destination. Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization is negotiating with Oman and says other international flights, including those to Istanbul, are operating as scheduled, according to the ISNA agency. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday, 21 September, that Iranian airlines would be barred from operating worldwide from 23 September under the threat of secondary sanctions on service providers: “you cannot provide them with fuel, you cannot provide them with landing services, you cannot sell them tickets, or you will be knocked out of the dollar system,” he told CNBC. Iran has 27 airlines, most of them domestic, and international routes are concentrated in Iran Air and Mahan Air. Analysts told Al Jazeera that Washington has no authority to close other countries’ airspace, and that cutting off fuel and ground handling achieves an equivalent effect.
The foreign ministries of Russia and Belarus said the two countries have called for 25 September 2026, on the sidelines of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, the ministerial meeting that launches negotiations on the Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century, according to Russia’s state agency TASS, citing the Russian ministry, and the Belarusian ministry’s press service as carried by Reform.news. The initiative is Belarusian, put forward in 2023, with Russia joining as co-author of the text. The two ministries held consultations in Minsk on 10 September 2026 to prepare the launch of the negotiations. Both governments present the document as a basis for relations among Eurasian states built on sovereignty, equality and the indivisibility of security.
Colombia’s government withdrew the declaration of intervention it had filed on 5 April 2024 in the case over genocide in the Gaza Strip brought by South Africa against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court made public on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, the decision Colombia notified on 18 September, according to the court’s official case page and Anadolu Agency. The intervention rested on Article 63 of the court’s statute, which allows a state that is not party to a dispute to make submissions when the case concerns the interpretation of a convention it has also signed. Colombia was never a party to the main proceedings, and the withdrawal does not affect them. The decision reverses the policy of Gustavo Petro, who severed relations with Israel in May 2024 and halted Colombian coal exports to the country. Abelardo de la Espriella, who took office on 7 August 2026, restored diplomatic and economic ties, according to Middle East Eye and Anadolu Agency: the government plans to reopen its embassy in Jerusalem, set up a bilateral economic commission and send a delegation to Israel in October. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar thanked Colombia for the withdrawal, according to ColombiaOne.
US president Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, at the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly that drug cartels are “the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere” and argued they should be “killed, exiled or detained as enemy combatants without the possibility of release”, according to Reuters. He spoke ahead of a meeting with leaders and foreign ministers from the Shield of the Americas, an anti-cartel coalition launched by his administration in March and made up of Latin American governments aligned with Washington; Brazil and Mexico are not part of it. Trump cited the operation that captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and the oil deal with the interim government as proof that Washington “will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere” and that it will use its “unmatched military might” if necessary, and said Mexico “must reclaim control of its soil from the enemies of humanity”. G1 reported that he asked members of the coalition to formally designate drug factions as “common threats to stability” and to impose sanctions. Since late 2025, the United States has carried out dozens of strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that, according to human rights groups, have killed more than 220 people and amount to extrajudicial killings.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met US special envoy Steve Witkoff on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, on the sidelines of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York and conveyed Iran’s conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian state television IRIB, cited by Middle East Eye: the immediate lifting of the naval blockade, the return of frozen Iranian assets and an end to the war on all resistance fronts. The meeting confirms the direct contact that US president Donald Trump described earlier as a roughly three-hour meeting that was “very good” and “very productive”. The same day, the European Union (EU) high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Kaja Kallas, also met Araghchi to discuss free maritime passage in the strait and in Bab al-Mandab: “There were no tolls or fees for passage before the war, and there should be none after the war,” she wrote on X, according to Middle East Eye. Kallas said she also raised “domestic repression inside Iran, including the sharp rise in executions and death sentences”.
Republican senator John Curtis of Utah called on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, for the US Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate the use of presidential family relationships for private financial benefit and to subpoena Donald Trump Jr. and Hunter Biden, according to the Associated Press and ABC News. In the letter sent to committee chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dick Durbin, Curtis cited Trump Jr.’s wedding after-party in the Bahamas in May 2026, partially paid for by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, head of the International Boxing Association (IBA) and close to Vladimir Putin. The case was revealed on 14 September 2026 by ProPublica, which reported that Kremlev covered hundreds of thousands of dollars, including the rental of a private island and a fireworks display, through an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai. “The country should not have to accept one standard for the family of a Republican president and another for the family of a Democratic president,” Curtis wrote, also raising the family-backed crypto ventures, international real estate deals and investments in defense contractors. Durbin backed the request, saying that to ignore the matter “is to run the risk of being complicit in a cover-up”; the committee confirmed it had received the letter but said the Senate calendar makes a hearing difficult this year. Trump said last week that his son repaid Kremlev, offering no public evidence of the payment.
The digital extortion group known as ShinyHunters says it has breached the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and stolen data on thousands of bureau employees, according to Reuters and 404 Media. The bureau did not reply to requests for comment. The group told Reuters in an online chat that it targeted the agency in response to a May 2026 FBI announcement that detailed its methods and advised targets not to pay, and posted on its dark-web site a screenshot of a vandalized FBI jobs site and what it described as a sample of the stolen data, including names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and, in some cases, information about spouses. Reuters said it could not verify the authenticity of the screenshot, but a message posted to the FBI jobs site on Tuesday said the portal and the Special Agent Applicant Portal were “currently unavailable”. The news agency said it partially verified the authenticity of some of the alleged personnel data by running names and postal addresses against credit bureau records and previously breached data preserved by dark-web intelligence firm District 4 Labs: it found a match in at least nine cases, but could not establish where the data came from or whether it was stolen from the FBI’s internal systems as the group claims. 404 Media, which reviewed a sample of 5,000 employees, said some of the phone numbers in the list matched people with the same names, and reported that the group defaced the jobs site with the message “this site has been seized by ShinyHunters”.
French president Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, in his final address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly that countries must resist a “return to the law of the jungle” in international relations, at a moment when “the rhetoric of defeat” is “giving way to abuse of power by empires”. “The question put to us, in very simple terms, is whether we want to live in this state of nature, with a kind of return to the law of the jungle, or in a civilised international society,” he said, according to France 24, which carried the speech with AFP, and DW. On Gaza, Macron hammered the rostrum and said “the scenes, the spectacle, it is shameful. Shame on all of us”: “What is our credibility worth if we remain inactive on Gaza? Some claim that peace has been achieved, but this has not opened up humanitarian deliveries.” He said respect for the “legitimate rights” of the Palestinian people is a “prerequisite for security” for Palestinians and for Israel, and that “all those who claim that Israel’s security requires the violation of the sovereignty of all of its neighboring states are making a very fateful error”. On Ukraine, he proposed a “double moratorium”: an end to strikes by both sides on energy and civilian infrastructure, and a matching commitment in the Black Sea to allow “grain shipments” to flow. “Winter is coming,” he said. Turning to artificial intelligence (AI), he called on countries to pool resources to build an “open-source frontier model” independent of “one of the great powers”: “I don’t want anyone to become the vassal of one of the great powers,” he said, naming India, Brazil, Singapore, African nations and the Gulf states as possible partners.
US president Donald Trump made more than 1,000 stock purchases and sales in July, worth between US$ 79m and US$ 270m, according to a The Guardian analysis of the financial disclosure released on Tuesday, 22 September 2026. He made more than 700 sales totaling between US$ 35m and US$ 137m and more than 440 purchases totaling between US$ 43.5m and US$ 134m. His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, between US$ 5m and US$ 25m each, on 20 July 2026; the same day he sold up to US$ 5m in Oracle and Costco shares and bought up to US$ 5m in Intuit and Salesforce stock. The White House said the portfolio is “independently managed by third-party financial institutions” and that there are no conflicts of interest: “Neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said. The disclosures, required by law, list only the date and a range for each transaction; the filing is published on the US Office of Government Ethics portal. Trump and Republicans are championing a ban on stock trading by members of Congress that would not cover the president or the vice-president.
A special court in Paris sentenced French citizen Othman Garrido, 32, to 30 years in prison on Tuesday, 22 September 2026 for murders committed as part of an organised group, with a 20-year period without parole eligibility. He was convicted over the public execution of two Iranians in Syria in September 2015 and acquitted of being their executioner; some 1,500 French nationals transited through Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State group in the 2010s, according to Le Monde and Agence France-Presse (AFP). At trial, Garrido said he was forced to follow the group or risk death.
Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, in his address to the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) that Washington is working “very closely” with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine and that a deal to end the war will come “more quickly than people understand”. The Kyiv Post reported that he said he would use, if necessary, the tariff powers granted by the law he signed the previous week — a measure that allows tariffs of up to 100% on buyers of Russian energy. Asked by reporters before the speech what message he had for Vladimir Putin, Trump said: “Settle the war.” CNBC reported that Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday, 21 September, that “a large number” of Russian diesel refineries had been “blown up”, that Russia has “lost control” of its diesel oil industry because of the war, and that the conflict must end, with “25,000 people, mostly soldiers, killed each month”. The average US retail price of a gallon of diesel rose above US$6.50 for the first time, according to AAA figures cited by CNBC, as Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries and the war with Iran squeeze global supplies. At the bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the Assembly, Trump said the two were discussing “figuring out a solution” and that “they’re going to reach a deal”, without saying what it would be; The Jerusalem Post, citing Reuters, reported that he said Putin is willing to meet to end the war, and that the two leaders are expected to discuss the deployment of Patriot missiles in Ukraine.
Albania’s Special Court of First Instance for Corruption and Organized Crime (GJKKO) ordered on 21 September 2026 that Vlora Hyseni, director of the State Intelligence Service (SHISH), be placed under house arrest and suspended from office, as part of the investigation into the National Agency for Information Society (AKSHI), according to the statement from the Special Prosecution Office against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK) carried by Albeu and Panorama. Hyseni is under investigation for disclosing an investigative secret and for aiding the perpetrator of a crime; Prime Minister Edi Rama announced her immediate dismissal, saying he expects “every suspicion raised by the prosecution to be investigated and clarified fully through an independent judicial process”. Panorama reports that Hyseni was in Baku, Azerbaijan, for an international meeting of intelligence chiefs when the measure was issued, was not at home on the morning of Tuesday, 22 September 2026, and entered Albanian territory through the Morina border crossing. Reuters reported that the court suspended the spy chief on suspicion of disclosing classified information to unauthorized people in connection with the AKSHI case, which manages Albania’s digital public services and IT infrastructure; Hyseni, who is originally from Kosovo, has headed SHISH since 2023. The same decision authorized searches at the home of former State Police chief Ilir Proda and at a villa complex in Durrës, and ordered pre-trial detention for a section head at the Institute of Forensic Police and an employee of a private company, according to Albeu.
A US federal judge blocked the deportation of Venezuelan Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, 20 September 2026, and still held with a bullet lodged in his back, according to his lawyer. The order by Judge Orlando L. Garcia, of the federal court in San Antonio, instructs Bobby Thompson, warden of the South Texas ICE Processing Center, to bring Garcés Pérez to a hearing on 30 September 2026; it was signed on Monday, 21 September, according to KXAN. Because his attendance is mandatory, he cannot be removed before the hearing, said his lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, who filed a federal lawsuit seeking a stay of removal and his release, according to the BBC. Travis County District Attorney José Garza wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and ICE Director David Venturella asking that the removal be paused while the shooting investigation continues, because Garcés Pérez is a central witness, according to Fox News. Congressman Joaquin Castro demanded his release from detention.
The US Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court on Monday, 21 September 2026, to review the ruling that freed Indian researcher Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University, who advocated for Palestinian rights and opposed Israel’s war in Gaza, according to The Georgetown Voice and Al Jazeera. The petition, docketed as Trump v. Khan Suri, asks whether federal immigration law barred a lower-court judge from ordering the release of a noncitizen held while removal proceedings are under way, and argues that rulings such as the Fourth Circuit’s give detainees a route to challenge deportation outside immigration courts. Suri, who holds a J-1 exchange visa, was detained in March 2025 by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and spent 58 days in custody; Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ordered his release in May 2025, and in July 2026 the Fourth Circuit ruled 2-1 that he should remain out of detention. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that the ruling is “practically disastrous”; the Third Circuit, in January 2026, in the case of activist Mahmoud Khalil, and the Second Circuit, in July, in the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, reached the opposite conclusion, and the Justice Department asked the court to take Khalil’s case as well. Suri also faces a separate immigration case, which opened on 15 September 2026, to decide whether the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can deport him.
Donald Trump called on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, at the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York for every country that is a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to resign from what he called an “out-of-control institution” and “an evil group of people”. “I call on all nations that are members of the ICC to officially resign from this rogue institution immediately,” he said, according to The Independent and Gulf News. The US president said Washington would “never allow US service members or anyone else to be investigated or given show trials by an anti-American tribunal with no jurisdiction over us”. The United States is not an ICC member and has never ratified the Rome Statute that created the court; Washington has sanctioned court officials since February 2025, after the ICC issued arrest warrants in November 2024 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed in July 2026 to “dismantle the ICC, brick by brick”, and The Independent reports that fresh sanctions against the court could be finalised shortly after the General Assembly.
About 50 opposition supporters protested in Caracas on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, outside the office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) against the participation of Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Andrés Velásquez, a former governor and leader of the La Causa R party, said Rodríguez ‘does not represent Venezuela’ and that the only point of interest for Venezuelans in her meeting with US President Donald Trump is the setting of a date for presidential elections, according to EFE and Agence France-Presse (AFP). Protesters held banners in Spanish and English against Rodríguez and against what they call US tutelage over the country.
The United Nations (UN) Security Council meets on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, to discuss artificial intelligence (AI) and international security, with China’s DeepSeek among the companies invited to brief the body, according to Reuters, which cited two people familiar with the matter. The agency reported that DeepSeek and fellow Chinese firm Moonshot were invited to make statements, that DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is not expected to appear and that plans could still change at the last minute. An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters last week that chief executive Sam Altman will brief the council in person, and diplomats expect senior Anthropic officials to take part as well, according to The Next Web. France, which holds the council’s rotating presidency this month, called the meeting, and a concept note circulated by Paris highlights the risk of malicious use of the technology and of losing control over advanced models. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said last week that the risks of rapidly advancing AI cannot be ignored, a position at odds with that of US President Donald Trump, who argues existing safeguards are enough. The council first took up the issue in 2023, when China said AI must not become a “runaway horse”.
A 15-year-old student opened fire with a shotgun outside a technical school in Turgutlu, in Turkey’s western Manisa province, at around 8am on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, wounding at least 11 people, according to the Los Angeles Times, which carried an Associated Press dispatch, and Deutsche Welle. Justice Minister Akin Gurlek said two of the wounded were in critical condition; the Associated Press reported three. The suspect, a pupil at the school, was detained along with his parents and his grandfather, the gun’s owner, and two chief prosecutors were appointed to investigate, including a claim that the student had been bullied. Deutsche Welle reports that minister Mustafa Ciftci said 31,000 school supervisors and police officers were assigned to schools deemed at risk under a measure announced on Monday, September 21, and that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promised even tighter gun controls, saying “one of the perpetrators’ aims is to terrorise society”.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accused Israel on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, of holding a “genocidal mindset” toward the Palestinians in a speech at the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York, during which the Israeli delegation walked out and Palestinian representatives applauded, according to Al Jazeera. “Despite this so-called ceasefire, more than 1,300 civilians have been murdered in Gaza,” Erdoğan said, describing the territory as “the most inhumane, most shameful concentration camp of our time” and adding that “no one with humanity, mercy or conscience can turn a blind eye”. According to Anadolu Agency, he called for Gaza’s reconstruction to begin “without wasting any time” and urged member states to increase pressure on Israel. In the same address, Erdoğan said the UN has failed to fulfil its duty to preserve peace and security and is “bleeding out” in Palestine, Lebanon and Sudan, and lamented the absence of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who was denied a US visa for the second year in a row. TRT World reports that he also accused Israel of extending its offensive to Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Qatar.
China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has opened an investigation into DeepSeek and Moonshot AI to determine whether sensitive data leaked when user requests were routed to models made by the US company Anthropic, according to a report by The Information carried by NDTV Profit and The News. The allegations come from Anthropic’s own September 2026 report, which said DeepSeek rerouted more than 12.1 million exchanges to Claude over a 14-day period in July and that Moonshot, the developer of the Kimi family of models, routed nearly 300,000 customer requests through 5,380 fraudulent accounts over 10 days while presenting the answers as its own. Anthropic also said some of the rerouted requests contained sensitive customer information such as credentials and data from internal corporate systems. According to The News, the CAC summoned representatives of the seven Chinese companies named in the report for several rounds of questioning, among them Alibaba, Zhipu, SenseTime, MiniMax and Xiaomi, and is weighing possible violations against China’s cross-border data rules. No sanctions have been announced.
Sri Lanka’s High Court on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, sentenced the 15 men convicted over the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings to 200 years in prison each and ordered their property confiscated, according to a dispatch from the Associated Press (AP) published by the Hindustan Times. The three-judge panel had convicted 14 of the 24 defendants of direct involvement and found a 15th guilty on some of the charges, acquitting the other nine. The bombings of April 21, 2019, struck three churches and three luxury hotels and killed more than 260 people, including 42 foreigners, according to AP, while the BBC puts the toll at 270 dead and more than 500 wounded. The trial ran on 23,270 charges and lasted nearly five years.
The United States is withholding an entry visa for Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who was due to address the United Nations (UN) General Assembly this week, according to a Reuters report published by the Hindustan Times, which cites Sudanese sources and a Western analyst. The visa appears to have been made conditional on Burhan signing a 90-day ceasefire proposed by US Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs Massad Boulos. Sudan’s UN ambassador, Al-Harith Idriss Al-Harith, asked in a letter dated September 21, 2026, for Secretary-General António Guterres to intervene, arguing that preventing a head of state of a member state from attending violates the organisation’s obligations. UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told Reuters that Guterres is “deeply concerned” and that the secretariat has raised the matter with US authorities. According to Reuters, foreign minister Mohieldin Salem will deliver the address instead of Burhan, who had been scheduled to speak on Thursday, September 24, 2026.
Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly that the Gulf is going through “one of the most dangerous phases” because of the US-Israeli war on Iran, and argued the crisis can be resolved through diplomacy, with the Strait of Hormuz reopened to navigation, according to Al Jazeera. He said the war is the “cumulative result of years” of postponing diplomatic solutions and called for a “regional system of collective security”, saying that without one “it has become possible for a war to erupt”. Sheikh Tamim called Israel’s expansion in the occupied West Bank “aggression” and said “what has transpired in Gaza is genocide in every sense of the word”.
The executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at an energy forum organised by Foreign Policy magazine that Europe faces a “very harsh winter”, possibly one of the hardest in recent years, with gas storage at historically low levels, according to the TASS news agency. Birol said European countries have decided to phase out Russian gas completely by 2027 and can no longer receive gas from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, pushing them to seek supply from the United States and Norway. European storage stood at 69% of capacity on September 17, 2026, below the 85% five-year average for the season, according to Reuters, which cites industry body Gas Infrastructure Europe.
Donald Trump said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham on the sidelines of the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York that relations with the United Kingdom are better than under Burnham’s predecessor Keir Starmer, and attacked the deal that transfers sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius while keeping Diego Garcia, home to a joint military base, under lease. “I don’t support it. I think it’s terrible. It was a terrible deal,” Trump said, according to The Guardian, which reports that Burnham nodded when the US president said the British prime minister would “look at it” again. The Jerusalem Post reports Trump praised Burnham as a “natural businessman” and said the two covered “everything from Rolls-Royce to energy to immigration”. Burnham had reaffirmed on Monday, September 21, 2026, to Mauritius’s prime minister, Navin Ramgoolam, his commitment to proceeding with the transfer, according to Middle East Eye. The deal was agreed by Starmer, and the legislation to implement it has been stalled since April 2026 over opposition from the White House.
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, in his opening address to the general debate of the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York that “Brazilian democracy belongs to Brazilians” and that Brazil “does not belong in anyone’s backyard”, in a reference to US pressure over the October 4, 2026 election, in which he is seeking a fourth non-consecutive term, according to Al Jazeera and G1. Lula said Latin America is seeing a resurgence of “hegemonic ambitions” and foreign interference in elections, and said the UN is failing to prevent wars, with credibility “never so low”, blaming the Security Council and the veto power of its members. “We do not need aircraft carriers watching our waters. We need cooperation to stop the flow of weapons and money that fuels crime,” he said. The speech came the same day Donald Trump used the rostrum to say Washington would use its “unmatched military might” if necessary to protect US interests in the Western Hemisphere, according to excerpts released by the White House.
Donald Trump told reporters at United Nations headquarters in New York on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that US officials held a roughly three-hour meeting with the Iranian delegation on the sidelines of the 81st General Assembly, which he described as “very good” and “very productive”, and that “they have another one scheduled in the very near future,” according to Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye. The announcement came hours after the president threatened at the Assembly’s opening session to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” if Tehran does not strike a deal to end the war. Neither outlet reported who took part in the meeting or where it was held.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video posted on X on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that he will use his address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, scheduled for Thursday, September 24, to defend the country’s soldiers and to “tell the truth” about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he accused of supporting Hamas and of inciting riots against the city’s Jews, according to The Jerusalem Post and The Times of India. “Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani,” Netanyahu said. “Shame on you for supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people.” The statement answers a CNN interview aired on Monday, September 21, in which Mamdani again called Netanyahu “a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people” and said the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the prime minister should be honored.
Iranian lawmaker Hossein-Ali Haji Deligani said in parliament on Sunday, September 20, 2026, that a triple-urgency bill, a mechanism that allows fast-track consideration, to withdraw the country from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has been submitted to the presiding board and is awaiting the approval of Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf to be put to debate, according to Press TV, Mehr News and Türkiye Today. “Given the circumstances facing the country and the aggression that the enemy has launched against us on two occasions, remaining in the NPT brings us nothing but losses,” he said, citing the referral of Iran’s case to the United Nations (UN) Security Council by the 35-member Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over alleged non-compliance with the inspections regime, a decision Russia and China opposed. The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Major General Mohsen Rezaei, said on Saturday, September 19, 2026, that the country remains committed to not producing nuclear weapons, but that leaving the treaty is a possibility in the face of threats from the United States and Israel. Iran International reported that similar proposals have circulated for months and that parliament’s leadership has kept them off the floor, and that neither Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei nor the Supreme National Security Council has said anything about pursuing a nuclear weapon, an option endorsed in separate remarks by hardline lawmakers.
The foreign ministers of Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan said in a joint statement on Tuesday, 22 September 2026 that they affirmed Saudi Arabia’s right to defend itself in line with international law and stressed the need to preserve the safety of navigation in the region, amid escalating attacks by Yemen’s Houthis, as reported by Reuters and published by Middle East Eye and the Times of India. The four ministers met on the sidelines of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York, voiced “deep concern” over the conflicts in the region, said dialogue and diplomacy were the only path to a sustainable solution and backed Yemen’s government in its efforts towards stability and peace. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed on 7 August 2026 by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, states that an armed attack against any one of the three countries will be treated as an attack against all, according to the BBC.
Delegations from Iran and Cuba walked out of the hall of the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York during Donald Trump’s speech on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, according to The Independent and The Hill. The Iranian delegation began to leave as the US president described the past six months of on-and-off military strikes against Iran, with only one person remaining seated; Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian and foreign minister Abbas Araghchi are in New York but did not enter the hall for the speech. Cuba’s delegation walked out after Trump called the country an “absolutely failed state”, said it “is failing like never before, and it will fall” and that “freedom will be coming to Cuba”. The president also accused the Cuban government of fomenting opposition in the United States; Washington has maintained an effective oil blockade since January 2026, cutting the island off from Venezuelan oil, and talks between the two countries have stalled.
Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that a new rotation of US troops is “already on its way” to the country, resolving part of the uncertainty over the military presence in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally bordering Russia, as reported by Reuters, Stars and Stripes and Mezha. Nausėda thanked Donald Trump and said the “US military presence in Lithuania is an indispensable part of our deterrence and collective defence”; Lithuanian foreign minister Kęstutis Budrys said “US boots on the ground are essential for deterrence, defence, and security on NATO’s eastern flank”. The United States has kept rotations in Lithuania since 2019, with battalions of about 1,000 troops. Stars and Stripes reported that the contingent is normally drawn from the Poland-based brigade, that the number and origin of the troops have not been disclosed and that the Pentagon had not publicly confirmed the deployment: in May 2026 defence secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a rebalancing of forces in Europe, withdrawing up to 5,000 troops from Germany and cancelling the move to Poland of the armoured brigade based at Fort Hood, Texas, which left the troops in Lithuania without a replacement.
International Criminal Court (ICC) deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan, who has been running the office since chief prosecutor Karim Khan was removed amid sexual misconduct allegations, said the court has taken no steps to withdraw the arrest warrants or the warrant applications against Israeli officials, despite US sanctions and pressure. “The case is still proceeding,” she told CNN in an interview aired on 18 September 2026. “We have taken no steps to try and withdraw any of those arrest warrant applications or the arrest warrants themselves, and the team continues to investigate in that situation.” The ICC issued the warrants in November 2024 for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza since October 2023. Washington has since sanctioned most of the court’s leadership, including former chief prosecutor Karim Khan, the two deputy prosecutors and nine judges, among them the court’s president, and secretary of state Marco Rubio pledged in July 2026 to “dismantle the ICC – brick by brick”, as also reported by TASS and Middle East Eye.
Sri Lanka’s High Court convicted 14 of the 24 defendants tried for direct involvement in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, and found a 15th guilty on some of the charges while acquitting nine others, according to Al Jazeera and The Hindu. The convictions include murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and the possession of firearms and explosives under the Prevention of Terrorism Act; the three-judge bench said sentencing would be delivered later on Tuesday. Six near-simultaneous bombings struck three churches and three luxury hotels on April 21, 2019, killing 279 people, 45 of them foreign nationals — the deadliest attack in the country since the end of its civil war in 2009. The verdict runs alongside the investigation into Suresh Sallay, the former head of the State Intelligence Service (SIS), arrested in February 2026 on accusations of orchestrating the attacks, which he denies.
Donald Trump told the opening session of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that he has “a big decision to make” on Iran: a deal that lets Tehran rebuild, or to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly,” according to Reuters and IANS. The US president said he expects a deal “right after the election” — the US midterms on November 3, 2026 — and called on other countries to enforce the “complete economic isolation” of Iran until it abandons its nuclear program, stops attacking commercial shipping and ends support for armed groups. He said Iran’s missile and drone manufacturing capacity is “almost gone” and that inflation in the country is “well over 300 percent,” a figure he attributed to no source.
The UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that the government of co-presidents Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo is responsible for the deaths in state custody of eight people detained on political grounds since 2018, among them Miskito Indigenous leader Brooklyn Rivera and Humberto Ortega, the president’s brother, according to the report released on Tuesday and reported by The Hindu. The report details contradictions in the government’s account of Rivera’s death: he spent 32 months in prison with almost no contact with his family before dying in May 2026, and the official statement attributed it to complications from an earlier COVID-19 infection, an explanation an independent assessment by Physicians for Human Rights called “not medically coherent.” The experts documented the enforced disappearance of at least 161 people since 2018 and called for information on 29 whose whereabouts remain unknown. Co-president Rosario Murillo said Rivera received medical care and family support; asked for comment, Nicaragua’s government declined to respond.
German investigators found a suspicious substance that may be explosive a few metres from where parts of a drone were discovered near the Wunstorf military airfield in Lower Saxony, according to reporting by NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung published by tagesschau on Tuesday, September 22, 2026. The drone, broken into several pieces, was found by a farmer about a week earlier roughly a kilometre from the base where Germany’s fleet of A400M transport aircraft is stationed, and at least one component was 3D-printed. Investigators are working on the assumption that the drone also carried explosives, but forensic analysis of the substance is not complete. The federal prosecutor’s office (Generalbundesanwalt) and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) are examining whether there is a link to the foiled attack with explosive-laden drones at Leipzig/Halle airport in early August 2026, which the German government blames on Russia and Moscow denies. Investigators believe the drone may have been at the site for up to two years, and the case was discussed at the weekly intelligence meeting at the federal chancellery.
Ineos halted production on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, at three chemicals plants in Hull, north-east England, blaming the cost of gas in the United Kingdom, which the company says stands at 12 times the level in the United States and eight times that of China. Two units at the Saltend complex have already stopped and the third will be shut down in the coming days, according to The Guardian and the Yorkshire Post. The company says around 1,000 employees at Saltend are affected and that a further 3,000 skilled jobs across the Humber region could be hit; no redundancies are planned. The plants produce acetic acid, acetic anhydride and ethyl acetate, and are Europe’s last world-scale acetyls units. UK natural gas prices doubled between July and September and reached their highest level since December 2022, a move the Yorkshire Post links to the United States and Israel’s war on Iran and the disruption of oil and gas supply through the Strait of Hormuz.
India and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) closed the seventh high-level meeting of the OPEC-India Energy Dialogue in New Delhi on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, with a pledge to deepen cooperation on market stability and investment, and set the next round for Vienna, according to a statement from India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas cited by Business Standard and News18. The meeting was co-chaired by Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Hardeep Singh Puri and OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais. Puri said India will remain an “important driver of global energy demand in the decades ahead” and called for sustained dialogue between producers and consumers; Al Ghais said that “many of India’s energy priorities are OPEC’s priorities”. The dialogue was launched in New Delhi in 2015 and the eighth meeting will be held at the organisation’s headquarters in Vienna, with no date yet confirmed. The meeting took place with Brent crude above US$ 100 a barrel, after the conflict disrupted supplies for major consumers including India and China, according to Business Standard.
Saudi Arabia restarted its East-West Pipeline and could resume exports from the Red Sea port of Yanbu, three sources briefed on the matter told Reuters; two of them say the line was pumping at a low rate, and state oil firm Saudi Aramco did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Drone attacks forced the kingdom to shut the pipeline on September 13, 2026, halting crude loadings at Yanbu. Since oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz were disrupted, the pipeline had been rerouting around 4 million barrels per day to the port, roughly 4% of global supply, according to the agency.
Iran offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if the United States eases military pressure and lifts its blockade on Iranian ports, according to a senior Iranian government official cited by Kyodo News and Reuters. The proposal, already conveyed to Washington through mediators, was approved by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the Supreme National Security Council, Kyodo says; the official says Presidents Masoud Pezeshkian and Donald Trump will not meet in New York and that Washington must make its willingness to negotiate official before any step. Both agencies describe the same source, not independently verified.
The European Union (EU) sealed on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, the deal renewing sanctions on nearly 3,000 people and companies accused of supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine for three years and removing billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman from the list, after Latvia relented and opted for a constructive abstention, according to Euronews and The Guardian. Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the EU confirmed the “difficult compromise” hours before the midnight deadline: the rollover moves from six months to 36 months, until 22 September 2029. According to diplomats cited by Euronews, France tied Usmanov’s delisting to the release of two French nationals held in Azerbaijan, and Slovakia vetoed keeping Fridman on the list; The Guardian reports that Luxembourg had asked for the same treatment for Fridman, who is seeking $16 billion from the grand duchy over the freezing of his assets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the decision unacceptable and publicly thanked Latvia for its resistance.
The United States and Denmark signed on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, the security agreement for Greenland, and Donald Trump said Washington will build two “very major” military bases on the territory, according to The Guardian and USA Today. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenlandic government leader Jens-Frederik Nielsen signed with Trump; Frederiksen said the text “respects the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark” and Greenland’s right to self-determination. The deal expands the US military presence without transferring sovereignty, bars US adversaries from establishing bases or investing on the island without written approval, and has no end date, according to a State Department official cited by USA Today. Reuters reported that Washington plans to reopen the Narsarsuaq base in southern Greenland.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, called on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to expel Spain, a day after Madrid said it would not take part in security for the event where he was to speak. Spain has had an arms embargo on Israel since 2023 and recognised the Palestinian state in May 2024. Sources: The Times of Israel and Middle East Eye.
Lithuania’s Parliament voted on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, to lift the ban on stationing nuclear weapons on the country’s territory, with 99 votes in favour, five abstentions and 13 against. The amendment to Article 137 of the Constitution still needs two votes three months apart, on 6 October and 12 January, each requiring at least 94 of the 141 lawmakers.
Interpol elected Brazilian Valdecy Urquiza as its secretary-general on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, with 118 votes, according to the Russian state agency TASS, which cited a briefing by Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev in Beijing. Urquiza had been the international cooperation director of Brazil’s Federal Police. Source: Interpol.
Guatemala's army received 2,000 Colt M4A1 rifles from the United States, part of a US$ 5,033,645 purchase funded with the country's own money through the Foreign Military Sales programme, according to The Rio Times. The shipment also includes 59 M240 machine guns and 57 grenade launchers, 14,035 items in all — a figure President Bernardo Arévalo described as more than 14,000 units, though 30-round magazines make up most of the count. Washington had restricted weapons sales to Guatemala's army since 1977 over civil-war human rights abuses, and the Guatemalan government announced the restriction had been lifted in March 2026. The weapons are destined for a new special jungle operations brigade in Petén, a region bordering Mexico and a drug-trafficking route.
The Dnipro steelmaker Interpipe Steel halted production after an overnight Russian strike killed four of its employees, according to the Kyiv Independent and TASS. The Ukrainian company said production equipment and infrastructure were damaged and that it is assessing how long the shutdown will last. Russia's Defense Ministry said the same day it carried out a mass strike on metallurgical and chemical plants and on fuel and energy facilities, including the plant. Interpipe employs around 9,500 people and exports to more than 50 countries, and its products become fuselage, propulsion and wing components for long-range drones, according to TASS.
Russia raised frozen pollock fillet exports to the European Union (EU) by 16% in volume and 44% in value between January and July 2026, according to calculations by the analytical centre of the Russian Fish Union, published by TASS, which cites Eurostat data. Sales totaled 113,000 tonnes worth US$ 513 million in the period, and Russia's share of the European market for the product rose from 44% to 51% by weight, keeping the country as the largest supplier. Frozen cod exports stood at 6,300 tonnes (US$ 58 million) and frozen cod fillets at 6,400 tonnes (US$ 78 million). The figures come from the industry body itself, and the EU maintains bans on higher-value Russian fish products.
France signed a contract to deliver radars and interceptor missiles to Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in New York, according to the Kyiv Post and United24 Media. Macron did not disclose the number or type of radars and interceptors, nor a delivery timeline. The announcement came the same day Russia hit industrial sites in Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih and Pavlohrad and Zelensky pressed for a new winter support package alongside France. Macron said he discussed the initiative with US President Donald Trump and that the two will work toward a moratorium on strikes against energy and civilian infrastructure, a proposal Ukraine conditions on Russian reciprocity.
Latvia blocked the compromise that would have renewed European Union (EU) sanctions on almost 3,000 people and companies linked to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and ambassadors of the 27 will meet again on the morning of Tuesday, September 22, 2026, in a last attempt before the listings expire at midnight, according to Euractiv and The Guardian. The deadlock began with France’s demand to delist Russian-Uzbek businessman Alisher Usmanov, on grounds Paris describes as “national security” and which diplomats link to the release of two French nationals held in Azerbaijan; the removal of businessman Mikhail Fridman was then sought by Luxembourg, the target of a $16 billion arbitration he has filed, according to The Guardian, while Slovakia vetoed keeping him on the list. In exchange for the delistings, Paris and Bratislava accepted widening the renewal period from six months to three years, a concession that did not convince Riga. Without unanimity by midnight, some 3,000 asset freezes and travel bans lapse at once. The sectoral sanctions on the Russian economy, renewed for a year in June, are not affected by this standoff.
T-Head, Alibaba’s semiconductor division, unveiled on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at the Apsara conference in Hangzhou the Zhenwu V900 artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator, which the company describes as China’s most powerful AI chip by computing performance and which is scheduled for mass production in the first quarter of 2027, according to TechNode and TrendForce. According to the maker, the V900 has 216 GB of memory, 1,200 GB/s of chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth and native FP8 and FP4 support, with a claimed performance three times that of its predecessor, the M890; clusters of up to 500,000 units, linked by T-Head’s own ICN Switch technology, would be able to train models of 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu also set a target of lifting Alibaba Cloud’s global data centre capacity above 20 GW by 2032, backed by more than US$ 53 billion of investment over three years. The V900 figures are the maker’s own claims, with no independent benchmarking, and the capacity targets describe announced expansion, not contracted capacity.
Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles confirmed on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that F-35 fighter jet parts shipped from the country to the United States for repair were diverted to Hong Kong, and said Canberra is assisting an investigation by the United States and Lockheed Martin, the programme’s prime contractor, per ABC News. Politico reported the cargo included a cockpit canopy with radar-absorbent material that reduces the jet’s signature on enemy radar. Marles described the material as not sensitive, according to AFP. No one has said why the shipment was diverted or who holds the parts today.
The developing El Niño in the Pacific surpassed all previous records on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, becoming the strongest event in the observational record, according to the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s weather service. Daily sea surface temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific were 3.05 °C above average on 19 September, exceeding the previous record of 3.02 °C set during the 2015 El Niño, per BBC Weather. The peak is not expected until later in 2026, and longer-term measures have not yet hit record levels. Professor Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the Met Office, said expected effects of the event are already being felt worldwide. Among them, the British service cites India’s monsoon running 15% below normal through 22 September and the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season with no hurricane formed so far.
Typhoon Dujuan killed four people and left six others missing in eastern Japan, in the prefectures of Chiba and Kanagawa, and injured 22, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency (FDMA) of Japan, cited by The Japan Times and Jiji Press. Chiba recorded three of the deaths. The typhoon, Japan’s 25th this year, cut power to tens of thousands of homes and forced more than 1.6 million people in the Tokyo area to leave at-risk areas, BBC News reported. The storm also brought record rainfall: Oshima island recorded 832 millimetres over 48 hours, more than double its average rainfall for the whole of September, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK. Japan’s meteorological agency lifted or downgraded most heavy rain and landslide warnings on Tuesday.
Ratings agency Fitch upgraded Sri Lanka’s long-term sovereign credit rating from ‘CCC+’ to ‘B-’ on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, with a stable outlook, citing macro-stabilization policies and structural reforms that eased external financing risks, according to Reuters and the Xinhua news agency. Fitch cautions that the country’s credit profile remains constrained by high government debt-to-GDP and modest foreign exchange reserves. Sri Lanka defaulted on its external debt in 2022.
Sri Lanka’s High Court on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, convicted 15 of the 24 defendants in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings and ordered the acquittal and release of the other nine, according to the BBC and the Xinhua news agency. Among those convicted is Naufer Moulavi, whom prosecutors named as the organiser of the attacks that killed 270 people and injured more than 500 on April 21, 2019, at three churches and three luxury hotels. The trial ran on 23,270 charges and lasted nearly five years. The convicted men have yet to be sentenced.
Mexico will restrict mobile phone use in elementary and middle schools from 3 November 2026, according to El País. The measure covers classrooms and playgrounds, and president Claudia Sheinbaum said the goal is to fight screen addiction in order to “protect their development and creativity”. The government cites support from 81% of the more than 565,000 teachers surveyed and from more than 70% of heads of household. Brazil removed phones from schools in January 2025; Chile has restricted them by law since February 2026, and Bogotá adopted a ban on 7 September 2026.
Latvia is the last-minute block on the package that would renew European Union (EU) sanctions on nearly 3,000 people and companies accused of sustaining Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to The Guardian. Latvian prime minister Andris Kulbergs wrote on Monday, 22 September 2026, that “extending sanctions for 36 months would be the right step”, but that he cannot accept the price being the removal of billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman from the list. Without a deal, the sanctions lapse at the end of this Tuesday, 22 September 2026; a short one-week extension, already used once, looks like the likely outcome. France and Slovakia are pushing the delistings, and Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, called the plan “unacceptable”. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said all western sanctions are illegal and should be revoked.
Lithuanian prime minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius told BBC Newsnight that the country has evacuation plans ready and that the population is affected by overnight drone alerts in Lithuanian airspace, according to The Guardian. Sinkevičius said the elderly and people with disabilities would be priority groups, and that the government is working on several scenarios. On the same day, the head of the Czech Republic’s security service, Michal Koudelka, told the newspaper that a limited Russian incursion into North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) territory is possible, along with false-flag provocations and a massive influence campaign, on a horizon of “months, not years”. Separately, Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda said a new rotation of United States troops is on its way to the country and will be no smaller than previous ones: up to 1,000 US troops have been stationed in Lithuania on rotation since 2019.
Ambassadors from the European Union’s 27 member states again failed to reach a deal on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, to renew sanctions on nearly 3,000 people and entities tied to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which are due to expire at midnight on Tuesday. Latvia rejected the compromise that would remove billionaires Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman from the list in exchange for a 36-month renewal of the remaining listings, according to Reuters and The Guardian. France backs Usmanov’s removal, diplomats say, to unlock the release of French nationals held in Azerbaijan. Without unanimity by midnight, roughly 3,000 listings — asset freezes and travel bans — fall at once.
Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that Gaza City will be evacuated and destroyed if a single Israeli is abducted, and that the military will not make partial withdrawals from the 63% of the territory it holds until Hamas is disarmed. He spoke at the Yom Kippur War memorial in Jerusalem, according to Agence France-Presse, The Jerusalem Post and i24NEWS. “If a single Israeli soldier or civilian is kidnapped, the entire city of Gaza, with its houses and terror towers, will be evacuated southward with its million residents,” Katz said, addressing the warning to Hamas and, explicitly, to the governments of Iran and Turkey. Gaza City’s municipality puts its population at about 1.1 million.
A senior Iranian official told Reuters on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that Iran can reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if the United States eases military pressure and lifts its blockade on Iranian ports. The official said the proposal was delivered to Washington through mediators on 16 September and that the Iranian delegation in New York has authority to revive diplomacy during the United Nations General Assembly; President Masoud Pezeshkian will not meet Donald Trump. The account comes from a single source speaking on condition of anonymity, and the US government had not confirmed the proposal at the time of publication.
The number of people missing since the start of the conflict in Ukraine has reached 275,000, according to the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, in an interview with the Russian newspaper Vedomosti published on Tuesday, 22 September 2026 and cited by TASS. She said the ICRC records an average of 10,000 new search requests a month and has been increasing the number of answers given to families. The figure comes from the ICRC itself, the organisation that mediates cases between the parties, and is not a government estimate.
Saudi air strikes on the Red Sea port of Mokha killed at least six people as Iran-backed Houthis press their offensive in Yemen, according to France 24, citing Reuters, the Associated Press and AFP. The episode comes the same day the spokesperson for the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Babar Baloch, said in Geneva that more than 130,000 people have already been displaced in Yemen and about 3,000 have fled to Djibouti since fighting resumed in early September, figures that could rise to 230,000 and 10,000 over the coming months, according to Middle East Eye.
A report by the United Nations (UN) special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Ben Saul, says the United States campaign of strikes on vessels suspected of drug trafficking cost US$4.7 billion by mid-2026 and did not reduce the flow of cocaine into the country: border seizures have remained steady and most of the drug arrives in shipping containers, which are rarely inspected, according to Al Jazeera. The document, published on Monday, September 21, says the 68 strikes recorded between September 2025 and August 2026 killed at least 223 people and that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe they constitute crimes against humanity of murder, according to BBC News. The report also argues that drug trafficking does not meet the legal threshold of an “armed attack” that would justify self-defence, and that less lethal alternatives such as maritime interception were available, according to ABC News. Washington maintains the operation is part of an armed conflict with designated “terrorist” organisations and is meant to keep drugs out of the country.
Lithuania’s prime minister, Mindaugas Sinkevičius, told BBC News that the country has evacuation plans in the face of Russian threats and that, if attacked, “we will fight back”. In an interview with the Newsnight programme, he said Lithuanians feel “constantly threatened”, partly because of drones entering the country’s airspace, and that the government is working on “a variety of scenarios”, not all of them discussed publicly, citing as an example moving elderly residents out of cities without traffic jams. Lithuania’s Interior Ministry approved a population evacuation plan on 14 July, and details released on 16 September set out three main routes out of the capital, one of them using Poland’s Podlaskie province as a transit corridor, according to Newsweek. The interview comes a week after North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) fighter jets shot down a drone that entered Lithuanian airspace from the direction of Belarus, according to BBC News. Lithuania shares a land border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
Saudi Arabia restarted its East–West pipeline and could resume exports from the Red Sea port of Yanbu later on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, according to Reuters, which spoke to three sources briefed on the matter; the line is pumping at a low rate. The 1,200-kilometre pipeline runs from Abqaiq to Yanbu and lets the kingdom move crude without passing through the Strait of Hormuz. It had been shut after drone attacks launched from Iraq. Saudi Arabia’s Energy Ministry said on 11 September that the conduit was halted “as a precautionary measure” after “multiple attacks” and that there were injuries, according to the state Saudi Press Agency; the following day the Foreign Ministry condemned the attacks and said the kingdom chose not to respond immediately, at the request of the Iraqi prime minister, according to the agency. Baghdad dismissed a military commander and opened an investigation after admitting the drones came from one of its provinces bordering Iran, according to BBC News.
The United Kingdom will send a Royal Air Force (RAF) Voyager tanker aircraft to provide “defensive” air-to-air refuelling to Saudi jets against Houthi attacks, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, saying he had agreed to a Saudi request for military support. The aircraft, based at the British base of Akrotiri in Cyprus, is expected to begin operating within days and the mission is “time limited”, according to BBC News, which reports it involves a single aircraft and that the support is limited to defending the country from drones and missiles rather than backing strikes on Yemen. Defence Minister Luke Pollard told Sky News, according to Middle East Eye, that the decision is about British “national security” and that “in dangerous times, good friends stand together”. Besides the Voyager, Saudi Arabia already hosts the Sky Sabre air defence system, and the Houthis have claimed drone and ballistic missile attacks on Riyadh and on energy sites on the Red Sea coast in recent days. The announcement came the same day the United Nations (UN) Refugee Agency (UNHCR) projected that around 230,000 displaced people in Yemen and another 10,000 refugees in Djibouti may need humanitarian assistance in the coming months, according to spokesperson Babar Baloch, cited by Middle East Eye.
Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that international flights by Iranian airlines are operating as scheduled and that no foreign service has been cancelled, according to the ISNA agency, cited by Middle East Eye. The body said no instruction has been issued to halt foreign flights and that passengers would be informed in advance of any schedule change. The statement answers the US Treasury Department’s announcement, which on Monday, September 21, sanctioned 36 targets tied to Iran’s aviation sector and suspended three authorisations that allowed overflights and the entry into Iran of foreign-operated aircraft of US origin or control, according to the Treasury’s release. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that “on September 23, all Iranian airlines will be grounded globally”, and that the threat also covers airports, fuel suppliers and ticketing agencies, according to the The Jerusalem Post.
China rejected on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, United States sanctions on Iranian airlines and threatened to fly through US airspace, the The Guardian reports. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a CNBC interview that “all the Iranian airlines will be shut down around the world” within days, according to Mehr News. “China consistently opposes illegal unilateral sanctions that lack a basis in international law or authorization from the UN Security Council,” foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said. Mehr News is an Iranian state-linked agency, and China’s threats appear in the British newspaper’s live coverage.
Yemen’s government said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that government forces retook two villages and a hilltop position in Al-Wazi’yah district, west of Taiz, in a counteroffensive against the Houthis, according to Arab News. This month’s Houthi offensive is the largest since the United Nations (UN)-brokered truce of April 2022 and has displaced 112,000 people, UN agencies said, cited by the Middle East Eye, which warns that up to 230,000 could be displaced if fighting intensifies. The The Guardian reports that aircraft from the Saudi-led coalition struck Houthi positions, gatherings and weapons stores west of Taiz, according to Yemeni government forces.
A 15-year-old boy was arrested after at least 11 people were injured in a shooting on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, outside the İnci Üzmez Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in Manisa, western Turkey, according to BBC News, which said two victims were in critical condition, the suspect fled on foot before being caught, and called it the third school shooting in the country in 2026. School security was tightened for the 2026-2027 academic year after the April shootings. Justice minister Akın Gürlek said, according to the Times of India, that the suspect’s mother, father and grandfather, who owned the weapon, had been detained.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Alimov, was denied a visa to enter the United States and is not attending the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, calling it “another unfriendly act”, according to G1. Peskov said the refusal contradicts US obligations as the UN host country and that Moscow will raise the case with Washington. Iran reported a similar case: its diplomacy, cited by TASS, said the United States denied visas to journalists in President Masoud Pezeshkian’s press pool. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov travelled to New York and holds a bilateral meeting on Wednesday with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The 81st session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly opens its general debate on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, in New York, under the theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all”, with Secretary-General António Guterres presenting the organisation’s annual report alongside the Assembly’s president, Bangladesh’s Khalilur Rahman, according to the UN and La Voce di New York. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva speaks first, followed by Donald Trump, in the order that gives Brazil the opening slot; Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian, who addresses the hall on Wednesday, September 23, are among the most awaited. According to G1, Guterres will make an appeal for the UN’s own survival, as the organisation faces funding cuts and criticism led by Trump, and Lula is expected to defend multilateralism and national sovereignty. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will speak by video after the United States denied him a visa, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cut his New York trip down to the day of his speech, on Thursday, September 24, according to La Voce di New York.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday, September 21, 2026, that his talks with Donald Trump in New York were “very constructive” and that there was a willingness to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has blockaded during the war, according to the Hindustan Times. In the account he gave to reporters, “several solutions” were discussed that would allow, without a comprehensive deal, more container ships and tankers to move through the strait, along with the situation in the Red Sea, a route that has gained weight for oil shipments with Hormuz closed and where the seizure of a strategic strait by the Iran-backed Houthis has complicated navigation. On Ukraine, Macron said he pressed Trump to speed up the delivery of missile interceptors to Kyiv, “a defensive measure”, and said in a post on X that the two discussed the prospect of an “energy truce and a moratorium in the Black Sea”. Before the meeting, Trump had blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for part of the surge in diesel prices because of attacks on Russian refineries and called on him to stop hitting Russian diesel, according to Le Monde. Macron also met Zelensky on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
Alibaba unveiled its new Zhenwu V900 artificial intelligence (AI) chip on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, describing it as the most powerful in China with three times the performance of its predecessor, and set a target of lifting Alibaba Cloud’s global data centre capacity above 20 gigawatts (GW) by 2032, according to Reuters and Mint, which cites the group’s official release. The announcement was made by company CEO Eddie Wu at the Apsara conference in Hangzhou, where Alibaba also laid out a plan to train Qwen models with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters on its path towards artificial superintelligence, and launched Qwen Intelligence for mobile devices, an end-to-end tool meant to run complex tasks on the handset itself. According to Mint, the chip, built by the group’s semiconductor arm, can be clustered at up to 500,000 units per cluster, as the company invests across three declared fronts: models, chips and cloud infrastructure.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it is ready for a “counteroffensive” and warned it will “change the geography of the war” if the United States attacks the country again, in the words of the force’s spokesperson, Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi, in an interview with the semi-official Tasnim news agency published on Monday, September 21, 2026, and reproduced by ABC News. “If a new aggression takes place, there will definitely be significant changes in our defense and our counteroffensive,” Mohebbi said, adding that Iran will bring “new weapons with new capabilities” into the battlefield and that the world will be surprised. On the same day, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said the country has reached a stage where its missiles can hit any target Tehran chooses and that it is answering a “hybrid conflict” of economic, military and diplomatic pressure, according to Middle East Eye, citing the state broadcaster Press TV. The statements answer the threats Donald Trump made in a Fox News interview on Sunday, September 20, when he said the options under consideration were “wiping [Iran] out, letting them rot economically or making a deal”, according to The Guardian. The two countries remain deadlocked over the Strait of Hormuz, closed by Iran, with commercial traffic disrupted and a US counter-blockade on Iranian ports, according to The Guardian.
Venezuelan Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent on a street in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, September 20, 2026, was readmitted to hospital after protests and pressure from Texas lawmakers over his health, because the bullet lodged in his back had not been removed, according to El País. He had said on a call during a press conference on Monday, September 21, that the bullet fractured his collarbone and was not taken out because it sits close to his spine, and that at the ICE processing centre in Pearsall, where he is being held, he received only a painkiller in the early hours. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said he was stable when he was transferred, and his lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, disputes the official account of an irregular entry: she says Garcés entered with authorisation in 2024 and applied for asylum, and that the deportation order was issued in absentia because a hearing notice went to his old address. Austin congressman Greg Casar has demanded that ICE not deport him, and the city saw a second night of protests.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that it opposes the “illegal unilateral sanctions” the United States has imposed on Iran and on Tehran’s trading partners and that it will take “all necessary measures” to protect Chinese interests, according to BBC News and Middle East Eye. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the package on Monday, September 21, branding it “Operation Economic Outcast” and describing it as the “single greatest financial offensive ever” against Iran, and said “all the Iranian airlines will be shut down around the world” on September 23 under threat of secondary sanctions on anyone servicing them, according to Middle East Eye. The Treasury mapped financial channels and evasion networks and sanctioned almost 60 entities, individuals and vessels. China is the largest buyer of Iranian oil, and David Oxley, chief climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics, told BBC News the package will have “only a limited direct impact” on Iran’s energy flows. The announcement comes before Donald Trump’s scheduled meeting with Xi Jinping on Thursday, September 24, and Iranian Economy Minister Ali Madanizadeh told state television that Tehran is “fully prepared” for the sanctions.
Lithuania’s prime minister, Mindaugas Sinkevičius, told BBC News his country has drawn up evacuation plans for “a variety of scenarios” in the face of the Russian threat, while saying Lithuanians “will not surrender” if attacked: “we will fight back, we will engage”. In an interview with the Newsnight programme, also BBC News, he said Lithuanians feel “constantly threatened” by Russia, in part because of the drones entering the country’s airspace, and gave the example of getting elderly citizens out of cities “smoothly”. Lithuania borders the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and is a NATO member that shot down a drone entering its airspace a week ago; Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas told BBC News the aircraft came from the direction of Belarus, a Russian ally, which did not comment on the incident.
A student opened fire on Tuesday morning, September 22, 2026, in front of the İnci Üzmez Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in the Turgutlu district of Turkey’s Manisa province, wounding 11 students, two of them seriously, according to The Associated Press, which cites Justice Minister Akin Gürlek and the provincial governor’s office, and to Euronews. The suspect, a pupil at the school, was detained shortly afterwards, and the minister said his parents and his grandfather, the owner of the shotgun used in the attack, were also taken into custody; two chief prosecutors were appointed to investigate the case, including allegations that the shooter was bullied at school. The education ministry suspended classes at the school for the day. The casualty count shifted through the morning, from four to eight wounded, before the minister’s figure. The attack comes a day after the education and interior ministers signed a protocol on school security for the 2026-2027 academic year and five months after two school attacks in southern Turkey in April, one of which left people dead in Kahramanmaraş and the other wounded 16 in Şanlıurfa.
The US national average price of a gallon of gasoline reached $4.48 on Friday, September 18, 2026, according to AAA as cited by The Associated Press, up roughly 17 cents in a week, 40 cents in a month and $1.27 from a year ago, at a time of year when prices usually fall. The national average diesel price hit $6.44 a gallon on Friday, 71% above its prewar level, with daily record highs since September 11, according to NBC News, which attributes part of the pressure to Russia’s extension of a diesel export ban through the end of September after Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian energy assets. Donald Trump said last week that the surge is an “inexpensive price to pay” for the war with Iran and publicly demanded that Volodymyr Zelenskyy stop striking refineries: “Mr. Zelenskyy has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia,” he said, according to NBC News. A Fox News survey released on September 16, 2026, found that 61% of voters call gasoline prices a major problem for their household, against 48% two years earlier, and that nearly two-thirds, 63%, say the administration has made the economy worse, compared with 52% in September 2025. Early voting in the November 3 midterm elections is already under way, and G1 highlighted that the surge strains household budgets and deepens dissatisfaction with Trump.
Sri Lanka is expected to learn on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, the verdict in the trial of 24 defendants over the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, the deadliest attack on civilians in the country’s history. The hearing at the Colombo High Court was due to open at 9:30 am local time (0400 GMT), with heavy security around the court complex, according to Agence France-Presse. Prosecutors filed 23,270 charges against the 24 defendants, the highest number ever brought in a single case in Sri Lanka, including murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism and possession of firearms and explosives under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Each defendant faces hundreds of counts because the indictment lists a separate charge for every person killed or wounded. All have denied involvement, and some could face the death penalty, which Sri Lanka has not carried out since 1976 and which is usually commuted to life imprisonment. Prosecutors identify Mohamed Naufar (Naufer Moulavi) as the ringleader who provided support to the eight-member suicide squad that struck three churches and three luxury hotels on April 21, 2019, killing 279 people including 45 foreigners, according to AFP; BBC News puts the toll at 270. The trial runs alongside a separate investigation into former intelligence chief Suresh Sallay, in custody and accused of orchestrating the attacks, which he denies; in July 2026, two former security officials were sentenced to death for failing to prevent the bombings despite intelligence warnings.
Donald Trump said in a phone interview with Fox News on Sunday, September 20, 2026, that he is in “deciding mode” on the war with Iran and that the options on the table are “wiping Iran out, letting them rot economically or making a deal.” “My question is, if and when do I blow the entire nation up? They better behave,” the US president said, according to correspondent Trey Yingst’s account quoted by The Guardian. The spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hossein Mohebbi, responded on Sunday that “if a new aggression occurs, we will certainly change the weaponry and the geography of the war” and that “our targets will no longer necessarily be the same as before,” in remarks to the semi-official Fars news agency and Iranian state television. Mohebbi said Iran has targets that have not yet been struck and that the Guard has prepared itself for a long war. CBS News reported on Sunday that Tehran has conveyed to Washington through mediators its conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, blockaded since the start of the conflict. Trump speaks on Tuesday at the opening of the general debate of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian speaks on Wednesday, September 23; Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is already in the city.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham makes his UN General Assembly debut on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, and holds his first meeting with Donald Trump on the sidelines of the gathering, with Ukraine, the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence (AI) and the cost of the conflict in the Middle East on the agenda, according to The Associated Press. Burnham, in office since July, said he will seek “common ground” with Trump and that the two had “found a connection” in two phone calls; in 2017, as mayor of Greater Manchester, he said the US president would not be welcome in the city, and in 2019 he said he would refuse to meet Trump. He is expected to urge Trump to send interceptor missiles to bolster Ukraine’s air defences before another winter of war, and the British government wants to discuss how to restore the free passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, blockaded since the start of the US-Israeli war with Iran in February 2026, according to AP. The closure of the route has pushed oil prices up and complicates the British economy.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi met in Tehran on Monday, September 21, 2026, with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and with his Iranian counterpart, Eskandar Momeni, in a visit during which Tehran thanked Pakistan for its regional mediation efforts. According to Pakistan’s interior ministry, the two discussed “Pakistan-Iran bilateral relations and the latest situation in the region,” and Momeni thanked Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the chief of army staff, Field Marshal Asim Munir, for their efforts toward regional peace. Iranian state television Press TV reported that Pezeshkian said the two countries can meet much of their needs by tapping “domestic and regional capacities” and that US pressure has produced greater convergence among Muslim countries; in the account published by The Express Tribune and UrduPoint, Naqvi said bilateral relations “will become even stronger.” It is the minister’s sixth trip to Tehran since the United States and Israel went to war with Iran in February 2026, and it comes as Islamabad tries to keep alive the memorandum of understanding signed in July between the United States and Iran to end the conflict. Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said on September 19, 2026, that the visit would focus on bilateral relations and that there was no plan to exchange messages on mediation, according to Pakistan’s Dawn. Al Jazeera reported that the meeting takes place amid escalating tensions between Tehran and Washington, and Pakistani government sources told Anadolu that the agenda included Houthi attacks on Saudi oil facilities.
The United States and Australia are investigating how components of F-35 fighter jets shipped from Australia to the United States for repair ended up diverted to Hong Kong as they crossed the Pacific, with some of the material still unaccounted for. The F-35 Joint Program Office at the US Department of Defense said it was “aware of a shipment issue of unserviceable F-35 Lightning II components” and that it was working with US authorities and industry partners “to retrieve these components, investigate the incident, and place safeguards to avoid a future occurrence,” according to the South China Morning Post and Defense News. The case surfaced in a Politico report on September 19, 2026; the shipment included a cockpit canopy, which carries a thin radar-absorbent layer, and the components were carried by a third-party company hired by Lockheed Martin, which manages the programme’s international spare-parts pool. On September 22, 2026, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles confirmed that Canberra is helping with the investigation: “We are examining very much everything that has occurred at the Australian end,” he said, according to ABC News. Marles played down the episode: “my understanding is that there is a sense of comfort, that we’re not talking about sensitive equipment here, or sensitive parts.” The US House Armed Services Committee is aware of the case and has received several briefings on it, committee spokesperson Heather Vaughan told Bloomberg. There is no public evidence that China obtained or inspected the material, and the Department of Defense has not said what exactly went missing. Australia operates 72 F-35s and has no facility able to repair the canopies. Hong Kong’s government said it does not comment on individual cases.
A six-second clip presented as the moment a Houthi missile struck Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport circulated on social media from September 20, 2026, and it is generated by artificial intelligence, according to a fact check by Agence France-Presse published on September 22, 2026. A reverse image search led to a longer version of the video posted on March 19, 2026, by Yemeni politician Ali Hussein Al-Bujairi and labelled “manipulated media” by X itself; the fact check points to signs of synthetic origin, among them a man apparently walking through a glass door at the three-second mark and a mobile phone floating by another man’s ear at the eleven-second mark. There were no official reports of an attack on the airport: the Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted the missile, and the fire on September 19, 2026, consumed a Saudi Aramco fuel tank at a depot next to the terminal, according to The Jakarta Post and the BBC. A fact check by German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on September 17, 2026, identified another clip, nine seconds long and with more than 340,000 views, presented as strikes on Abha and also generated by artificial intelligence, along with a video of an ambush that is in fact April 2024 footage with commentary from a 2018 football match spliced in; in both cases, the detection platform Hive Moderation flagged the imagery as synthetic. The Deutsche Welle fact check notes that the difficulty of observing the conflict independently leaves room for this kind of content, and a Misbar verification on September 21, 2026, examined the same Riyadh airport video.
Nearly 130,000 people have been displaced across seven governorates in Yemen since the Houthi offensive on the Red Sea coast began, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM): the agency’s latest data, from September 20, 2026, record 129,438 displaced people, or 21,573 households, against 118,086 counted on September 18 — an increase of 11,352 people in three days. Taiz hosts the largest number, with 73,494 displaced people, followed by Lahj, Aden and Al Hodeidah, and by Sunday evening, September 20, 3,106 people had crossed the Red Sea to Djibouti. “The numbers keep climbing,” said Othman Belbeisi, IOM Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, who said many families have already been displaced more than once. Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Sarea said 28 airstrikes hit three provinces in the previous 24 hours and put the cumulative total since the escalation began at 760 — a figure without independent confirmation.
Alibaba unveiled the Zhenwu V900 accelerator on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at its Apsara conference in Hangzhou, billing it as China’s most powerful artificial intelligence chip. According to chief executive Eddie Wu, the chip delivers three times the performance of the previous-generation Zhenwu M890 and can be clustered up to 500,000 units to train frontier models; it is built by the company’s T-Head division and is scheduled for mass production in the first quarter of 2027. Wu also set a target for Alibaba Cloud to operate more than 20 gigawatts of global data center capacity by 2032, citing demand he said is growing exponentially, and the company plans to train a model with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters. T-Head has delivered 560,000 chips across the Zhenwu family, with more than 400 external customers, and the group has committed more than US$ 53 billion to artificial intelligence over three years, raising about US$ 10.2 billion in August 2026 in a follow-on share sale in Hong Kong. Performance, capacity and timing are the company’s own targets and claims.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that units of its “Centre” group of forces completed the encirclement of Ukraine’s main defence centre in Dobropillya, in the Donbas, claiming that two Ukrainian National Guard brigades — the 4th and the 15th — and the 425th Assault Regiment “Skala” were surrounded, in the ministry’s daily briefing carried by Sputnik. Ukraine’s General Staff did not confirm the encirclement: in the update released on Tuesday covering 21 September it recorded 248 combat clashes along the front, the highest number in the Pokrovsk sector, and listed Russian assaults in the Dobropillya, Novyi Donbas, Myrne and Bilytske directions. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US-based analysis centre, assessed on 21 September that Russia is maintaining the highest tempo of attacks on the front there, averaging 32 a day since 1 August, without establishing footholds.
The Kuibyshev refinery, one of the largest in Russia’s Samara region, was hit by drones overnight into Tuesday, 22 September 2026, and a major fire engulfed the plant, according to the Russian opposition outlet ASTRA, which geolocated footage filmed by residents, and the Kyiv Independent. Samara governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said “dozens of drones” struck industrial enterprises and that homes and vehicles were damaged, without reporting casualties. The refinery sits 765 kilometres from the Ukrainian border and can process up to 10,000 metric tons of oil a day, according to Reuters, and was already forced to halt operations by a strike on 10 June 2026. Russia’s Defence Ministry said it intercepted 297 drones over 14 regions and occupied Crimea — a figure that has not been independently verified — and the federal air transport agency restricted flights in Samara and other cities in the region overnight.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, meets Donald Trump on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, carrying a proposal for an energy truce that would halt strikes by both sides on power facilities before winter, according to Reuters. Arriving in the city a day earlier, Zelensky said “concrete security proposals and de-escalation measures” are on the table and that a new drone deal is ready to be signed, with around 20 meetings planned during the visit, according to the Kyiv Independent. Trump has voiced concern about the damage to Russian refineries hit by Ukrainian drones, and Russia, which has more missile firepower, has not signalled it seeks to pause the air war, Reuters reported.
Russia struck industrial sites in Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih and Pavlohrad in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region overnight into Tuesday, September 22, regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha said. Three people were killed and six injured in Dnipro, where a business property and a warehouse were badly damaged, and the governor of the Poltava region, Vitalii Diakivnych, reported a “massive” attack on an industrial enterprise and a critical infrastructure facility. A strike on an energy facility left nearly 100,000 consumers without power in the northern Chernihiv region, the local distribution company said. Ukraine’s air force said the overnight barrage included an unspecified number of Oniks anti-ship and ballistic missiles, as well as four cruise missiles and 212 drones. Russia’s Defense Ministry said it hit enterprises in the metallurgical and chemical industries, the fuel and energy sector and the defense industry complex, along with port infrastructure and vessels. With the front line largely stalled more than four and a half years into the war, Moscow and Kyiv have increasingly struck businesses, ports and logistics targets in recent months, Reuters noted.
Nearly four weeks after Nepal’s August 26, 2026 floods, more than 1,000 children remained in temporary shelters, according to an assessment by Nepal’s National Child Rights Council and the nonprofit Save the Children, with data from September 4: 102 children were unaccompanied by any relative and 439 were separated from their parents and in the care of relatives. More than 500 are living in those shelters with their parents dead or missing, and Nepali law requires a person to be missing for 12 years before they can be declared dead, with an exemption during disasters when relatives must seek a judicial declaration. A Nepal Police bulletin released on September 16 put the death toll at 1,404 with about 6,150 people still missing from the disaster, triggered by a glacier and rock collapse near the border with Tibet. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates 32,000 children were displaced and said 18 schools were destroyed and 20 others damaged, leaving about 10,000 school-age children without classes.
Typhoon Dujuan left at least four people dead and 22 injured in Japan, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency (FDMA) said, cited by Agence France-Presse on Tuesday, September 22: three deaths in Chiba prefecture and one in Kanagawa, both near Tokyo. Searches for six people missing after landslides continued on Tuesday morning. More than 45,000 households in Chiba were still without power and 460 houses were damaged. The death toll, put at two on the night of Monday, September 21, rose as rescue teams advanced. The storm moved away from the coast and out into the Pacific on Tuesday morning, prompting the Japan Meteorological Agency to lift or downgrade most heavy rain and landslide warnings. Oshima island recorded 832 millimetres of rain in 48 hours, more than double its average for the whole of September, public broadcaster NHK reported, and Tokyo’s Edogawa ward logged a local record of 282.5 millimetres in 24 hours. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi delayed her departure for New York by about four hours and arrived late on Monday, Kyodo reported; she is due to meet Donald Trump on Tuesday.
The Trump administration has informally notified congressional committees of a US$ 2.8 billion arms package for Israel that includes 40,000 907-kilogram bombs, 20,000 MK-84s and 20,000 BLU-117s, The Washington Post reported, citing a government official speaking on condition of anonymity, along with Reuters. If completed, it would be the largest single sale of that munition to Israel in recent years and would exceed a 2025 transfer worth nearly US$ 3 billion that contained more than 35,500 of the bombs and was approved after the administration bypassed normal congressional review. Most of the package would be financed through Foreign Military Financing, a mechanism under which Washington provides the money and Israel buys the weapons from the United States. The package also includes 20,000 I-2000 penetrator warheads, designed to punch through hardened underground structures. Outlets such as Al Jazeera fold the warheads into the bomb count to reach 60,000 items, while The Washington Post’s account treats the two categories separately. The State Department said it does not comment on pending sales before formal notification to Congress, and Senators Bernie Sanders and Chris Van Hollen have said they will work to block the sale. The deal is not final, and deliveries of orders this size can take years.
United Russia, the party of President Vladimir Putin, won 355 of the 450 seats in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, according to preliminary results with more than 95% of ballots counted, announced on Monday, September 21, by Central Election Commission (CEC) chair Ella Pamfilova. The tally includes single-mandate districts, exceeds the party’s previous record of 343 seats in 2016 and preserves its constitutional majority of 301 seats, enough to amend the constitution without support from other parties, according to Reuters. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) came second with 40 seats, the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) took 25 and New People 20. Voting ran from September 18 to 20 and was the first Duma election since Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine; on the final day, Russia’s Defence Ministry said it downed 1,110 Ukrainian drones across 19 Russian regions and Crimea. The anti-war Yabloko party won no federal seats but cleared the 5% threshold in the Novgorod regional parliament, Reuters reported.
Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment told the TASS news agency that projected output on the country’s continental shelf amounts to 23 million tonnes of oil and 53 billion cubic metres of gas in 2026, with 2027 forecast at the same level, in line with the technical design documentation for the fields. The figures are projected levels set in the fields’ technical documentation and do not correspond to volumes already extracted, according to the ministry. Russia has 75 oil and gas fields on the continental shelf, 20 of them already producing.
Houthi fighters are pushing to seize the Kahboub Mountains in the provinces of Taiz and Lahij, which separate the Red Sea coast from the government-held south of Yemen, according to five Yemeni military sources cited by Reuters on Monday, September 21. Fighting has centred on the outskirts of the remote mountain district of Al-Wazi’iyah in Taiz and on Ras al-Ara on the Indian Ocean coast, between the mouth of the Red Sea that the group seized last week and the government base in Aden; the aim is to protect the rear of Houthi forces around the Bab al-Mandab Strait and open new fronts, the sources said. Situation Report No. 4 from the World Health Organization (WHO) office in Yemen, issued on September 20, records 674 deaths and 2,998 injuries from August 6 to September 18, and 122,297 people displaced — in 17,852 families, through September 15, across eight governorates — citing Yemen’s Executive Unit for the Management of IDP Camps. The AFP news agency, citing Houthi-affiliated al-Masirah TV, reported that Saudi strikes killed six people in Mocha, including two children and a woman; Saudi Arabia has not commented.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, arrived in New York on Monday, September 21, to lead Iran’s diplomatic delegation at the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly. Araghchi is the highest-ranking Iranian official to enter the United States since the war began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February, according to Arab News and the Indian Express. He left Iran on Sunday evening with a stopover in Qatar and spoke by phone with UN Secretary-General António Guterres, according to Iranian state television. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei wrote on X that the minister heads “a diplomatic delegation” at the assembly. Before departing, Araghchi told Iranian journalists his main objective is to use the platform to defend “the legitimacy, rights and interests of the Iranian people.” President Masoud Pezeshkian, due to address the assembly on Wednesday, September 23, left Tehran on Tuesday morning, according to the Mehr news agency; Iranian state media had reported that Washington refused visas to members of the delegation, including its communications team.
Operators of civilian nuclear plants in the United States bought 13 million separative work units (SWU) of enrichment services in 2025 at an average price of $108.70 per SWU; 77% came from foreign suppliers, and Russia accounted for 26% of that foreign-origin SWU — ahead of France (18%), the United Kingdom (14%) and the Netherlands (8%), according to the annual uranium marketing report of the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). The 2024 US law that bans imports of Russian uranium lets the Department of Energy grant waivers when alternative supply is unavailable, and that authority expires in January 2028; new enrichment projects in the United States and among allies are not expected to reach commercial scale before 2029, according to Bloomberg. Foreign Policy reported on Tuesday that Russia remains the largest supplier of enrichment services to US nuclear utilities.
US District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the Justice Department to respond by Tuesday, September 22, to the request by CNN, MS NOW and Politico for a temporary restraining order against the White House ban on the three outlets, and scheduled a videoconference hearing for Wednesday, September 23, at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time, according to CNBC. The outlets are seeking the immediate restoration of the permanent access credentials revoked on September 18, when they were barred from the White House complex; the suit claims violations of the First Amendment and of due process.
Two New Zealand Navy vessels — the frigate Te Mana and the tanker Aotearoa — transited the Taiwan Strait on Friday, September 18, as part of a three-month Indo-Pacific deployment, the country’s Defence Force said on Monday, September 21. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called the transit “a routine activity,” carried out “in international waters” and under international law, and said he did not expect any reaction from China, New Zealand’s largest trading partner. China’s Defence Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Taiwan’s Defence Ministry said the strait is an international waterway and that it does not proactively disclose the movements of allied forces. Reuters reported, citing one source, that the Aotearoa was tracked by Chinese forces when it last transited the strait in November 2025.
German leaders are preparing to deny the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) access to the country’s secret war plan, The New York Times reported on Tuesday, September 22. The roughly 1,000-page document, known as OPLAN Deutschland, was drafted in 2024 to set out how the German military would respond to another Russian attack in Eastern Europe, and the full version is held by the heads of Germany’s 16 states. Defence Minister Boris Pistorius raised on September 8, in a closed-door meeting with defence policy experts from the governing coalition’s parliamentary groups, the option of withdrawing the OPLAN from the Saxony-Anhalt state chancellery if the AfD takes power there, to prevent the plan from reaching Moscow, according to the German network RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND) and Bloomberg. The AfD won Saxony-Anhalt’s state election on September 6 with 43.8% of the vote, and Germany’s domestic intelligence service classifies the party’s branches in Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Saxony as confirmed right-wing extremist organizations.
Seven countries and the European Union (EU) launched the inaugural summit of “Partners for Multilateralism” (P4M) in New York on Monday, September 21, a group presenting itself as a defender of a UN-based international order and one removed from superpower politics. The joint declaration “A joint commitment to multilateralism, international law, peace and prosperity” lists Australia, Barbados, Brazil, Canada, the EU, India and Kenya as initial co-sponsors, according to the office of Canada’s prime minister, and was co-hosted by European Council President António Costa, prime ministers William Ruto of Kenya, Anthony Albanese of Australia, Mia Mottley of Barbados and Mark Carney of Canada, and foreign ministers Mauro Vieira of Brazil and Subrahmanyam Jaishankar of India, according to UN WebTV. The text says economic interdependence “is increasingly used as a source of leverage”, cites the triple planetary crisis and the rapid development of artificial intelligence among the challenges requiring cooperation, and backs reform of multilateral institutions, including through the UN80 process. In his opening remarks, Jaishankar said the “four F crisis” — fuel, food, fertiliser and finance — “cannot be left to itself”, according to Times Now. In a joint editorial in the Financial Times, Costa, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Ruto and Carney wrote that P4M will not be another exclusive bloc or an international bureaucracy, and cited 2025’s record number of state-based armed conflicts since 1946, in 35 countries, according to The Hindu.
Donald Trump meets on Tuesday, September 22, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York with the leaders of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — to discuss the next steps in the war against Iran, according to Axios, which cited three sources familiar with the plans. Iraq and Jordan have been added to the list and Egypt may take part, according to Abu Dhabi’s The National. The meeting is expected to focus on US proposals for a postwar strategy, which the White House intends to finalize after November’s midterm elections, Axios reported. At the same panel attended by the UAE’s diplomatic adviser Anwar Gargash, US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz said Iran had shifted from arming Hezbollah to increasingly arming the Houthis with “very sophisticated” drones and cruise missiles; Gargash called for a “new mindset” toward Iran, saying the region’s future should also be discussed between Tehran and Arab states. US officials say Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has been granted a visa to address the assembly on Wednesday, September 23, and that no meeting with Trump is planned, according to ABC News.
Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez arrived in New York on Monday, September 21, for the United Nations General Assembly and is due to meet Donald Trump on Tuesday, September 22, on the sidelines of a reception hosted by the US president, according to Reuters. It is her first trip to the United States since she took office in January 2026 under Washington’s oversight, after a US military operation captured Nicolás Maduro, who is awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges in New York. Her delegation began discussing energy, debt and mining with counterparties in the United States, talks expected to lead to agreements under Trump’s plan to rebuild Venezuela’s key industries, Reuters reported, citing officials and sources. She met Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) President Ilan Goldfajn and, in separate meetings, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank President Ajay Banga. The IDB is drawing up a two-year engagement plan for Venezuela focused partly on electricity and social protection, Goldfajn told Reuters. In August 2026, the two governments announced an oil agreement giving the United States 55% of the output of a new company with rights over 17 fields, according to the Associated Press (AP).
G7 foreign ministers called on Iran on Monday, September 21, to end its arming and support of the Houthis in Yemen, which they described as a “dangerous pattern of escalation” that risked undermining international trade, and condemned the group’s “unacceptable continued strikes” in Yemen and against Saudi Arabia, according to Reuters. In a statement issued after a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the ministers of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States called on the Houthis to “immediately cease all military actions, all threats and attacks against civilian shipping” and to return to the political process in good faith. The statement came the same day the Houthi-run Saba news agency said Saudi-led coalition airstrikes killed at least six civilians, including two children and a woman, and wounded eight in Mokha, the Red Sea port city the Houthis captured on September 10, according to AFP and France 24; the toll has no independent confirmation.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday, September 21, that his meeting with Donald Trump in New York was “very constructive,” and that he pressed the US president to speed up deliveries of missile interceptors to Ukraine, which he described as a defensive measure. The two met at Trump Tower a day before the opening of the general debate of the United Nations General Assembly, and Macron said they held a long discussion about Ukraine and Russia as well as the situation in the Red Sea, which he called important for global prices. According to the French president, Trump was “very receptive.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is also due to meet Trump in New York this week, according to the Kyiv Post.
India’s largest refiners have begun seeking alternative crude cargoes for November delivery and may cut purchases of Russian oil after the US sanctions law raised the threat of tariffs of up to 100% on goods from countries that buy Russian energy, Bloomberg reported, citing people involved in the discussions. Russian imports have already eased and are expected to average about 1.9 million barrels a day in September, more than 35% of the total and the lowest since April, according to Kpler. India is the world’s third-biggest crude buyer and had taken more than half of its imports from Russia in some recent months. Iraq has emerged as the main alternative: 535,000 barrels a day in the first half of September, against an August average of 163,000 barrels a day, also according to Kpler. Replacing the Russian volumes will be hard: Urals delivered to India cost about US$133 a barrel at the end of last week, according to Argus Media, and negotiations for November cargoes begin in the final week of this month.
Lebanon’s general amnesty law remains suspended by the Constitutional Council, which ruled by majority on September 10 to freeze the effects of the contested text until a final verdict expected by early October, after an appeal by the Strong Lebanon bloc of MP Gebran Bassil, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) and The New York Times. The suspension blocks the release of detainees who would have benefited, and prisoners protested the decision, some of them launching a hunger strike, according to The New York Times. The law, passed by parliament on August 12, 2026, and signed by President Joseph Aoun, is the first general amnesty since 1991: it commutes death sentences to life imprisonment, cuts life terms to 17 “prison years” — each counted as nine months — and orders the release of anyone held for more than 12 years without trial, according to AFP and New Arab. The most cited case is that of Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir, sentenced to death over the 2013 Abra clashes in which 18 Lebanese Army soldiers were killed. Bassil argues the text pardons perpetrators of murder, rape and attacks against the army and wants it narrowed to Islamists held without trial; Prime Minister Nawaf Salam is the amnesty’s main backer.
The general debate of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly opens on Tuesday, September 22, in New York, with about 130 heads of state and government registered through September 28 under the theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all” and under the presidency of Bangladesh’s Khalilur Rahman, according to the UN. By tradition Brazil speaks first, with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, followed by US President Donald Trump; Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan speaks fourth, after King Abdullah II of Jordan, and French President Emmanuel Macron also addresses the hall on the first day, according to the Associated Press. Secretary-General António Guterres delivers his final opening address of a term that ends on December 31. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian speak on Wednesday, September 23, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speak the next day, Abbas by video, after Washington denied him a visa for a second consecutive year, according to the Associated Press. The Gulf war, artificial intelligence and climate change dominate the week.
21 Sep
Britain and the United States test-fired a torpedo from an uncrewed underwater vessel instead of a crewed submarine for the first time, the UK government said on Monday, September 21. According to London’s statement, the live firing took place in UK waters last week as part of the alliance of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States (AUKUS) and “marks a major advance in the future of submarine technology” for the three countries. The heavyweight torpedo, jointly developed by the United States and Australia, was launched from a 12-metre undersea drone built in Britain and named XV Excalibur. In 2025, an operating centre in Australia, more than 16,000 kilometres from the vessel’s home in Plymouth, took remote control of XV Excalibur during Exercise Talisman Sabre, according to the British Royal Navy. Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, told AFP that the test was “noteworthy” and that “the employment of a lethal payload illustrates that uncrewed systems can play roles which extend beyond surveillance”. The announcement came on the day Prime Minister Andy Burnham flew to New York for the UN General Assembly, where he will hold his first meeting with Donald Trump since taking office in July and will announce a “new AI and autonomy partnership” with Washington, according to the UK government.
European Union ambassadors failed on Monday, September 21, to finalise the deal that would remove businessmen Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman from the bloc’s sanctions list, and talks resume on Tuesday, September 22, at 06:00 GMT. One diplomat told AFP that Latvia had lodged a last-gasp objection. According to diplomats cited by AFP and Euronews, the package negotiated by Ireland’s Council presidency would have delisted both men and renewed sanctions on about 3,000 other Russia-linked individuals and entities for 36 months, far longer than the usual six or 12 months. Renewal requires unanimity among the 27 member states, and the regime expires at the end of Tuesday. France had pushed to remove Usmanov, who holds Russian and Uzbek citizenship, citing “national security”; Reuters, citing three European diplomats, linked the French request to Azerbaijan’s detention of at least two French nationals, an account Baku rejects. Luxembourg demanded the same treatment for Fridman, who is seeking US$ 16 billion in arbitration against the grand duchy. Lithuania and the other Baltic states opposed the move, and Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote that delisting “is unacceptable and would send the wrong signal to Moscow”.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi meets Donald Trump on Tuesday, September 22, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, two days before the US president’s summit with Xi Jinping at the White House, The Japan Times and Reuters reported. Takaichi wants to press Trump on Japan’s positions over Taiwan and trade so that he does not lean toward conciliation with China, according to The Japan Times. Reuters notes that Takaichi angered Beijing in 2025 by saying Tokyo could be drawn into a conflict over Taiwan, and that analysts say allies fear Trump may offer concessions to Xi in return for an economic win he could showcase before November’s midterm elections. Takaichi, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and Trump are all scheduled to speak at the General Assembly on Tuesday, Reuters reported.
The four US television networks that share White House coverage with CNN — ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC — said they will stop airing events designated as presidential pool coverage, in support of CNN, which the administration barred from the grounds, according to The Guardian and the Hindustan Times. “Effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President,” Bryan Boughton, Fox News’s Washington bureau chief and the pool chair, wrote in an email to pool members, as quoted by The Guardian. “There will be no replacement pool put in place.” The pool is the arrangement under which the five networks take turns covering presidential events and distribute the material to other outlets. Without it, Monday’s ribbon-cutting for the White House’s new helipad went out without audio: on the official feed, Trump’s remarks were drowned out by the sound of the helicopter engine, according to the Hindustan Times. All five networks, CNN included, signed a joint statement: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.” The Washington Post said it will hold back its photographs of presidential events until after midnight Eastern time, and The New York Times said it would not publish or distribute images from the White House still photography pool on Monday. The print, radio and wire pool kept following the president’s movements.
The United States, Japan and South Korea reaffirmed on Monday, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, their commitment to the “complete denuclearization” of North Korea and called on Pyongyang to resume dialogue, according to the State Department and South Korea’s foreign ministry. The joint statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi and South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun also reiterated the three countries’ commitment to the defense of Japan and South Korea and expressed support for Taiwan’s “meaningful participation” in international organizations, according to Reuters. The statement came three days before Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington, scheduled for Thursday, September 24.
North Korea confirmed on Tuesday that what South Korea identified as two short-range ballistic missiles on Sunday was a test of a “new combat weapon system,” carried out in the presence of Kim Jong-un, according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). Kim called the test “an unquestionable demonstration of advanced defense technology” and “a clear renewal in the modernization of the armed forces,” and said the country’s adversaries would better understand what the technological advance means militarily, according to the state agency. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff had said the two launches, from the Wonsan area about three hours apart, flew roughly 450 kilometers and more than 600 kilometers. The North did not specify what type of weapon was tested.
Nvidia and other chipmakers are pressing Congress to strip from the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provisions that would restrict China’s access to their most advanced chips, as the debate over artificial intelligence (AI) safety reshapes the politics of the issue in Washington, according to POLITICO. The Senate draft, which has not yet passed the chamber and is likely to go straight to negotiations with the House after the midterms, is expected to require tracking of exported chips, let Congress block exports of advanced AI chips to China and impose new controls on chipmaking equipment. “What Jensen argues is that the threat of China is greater if they have to develop their own chips, and that’s not a frivolous argument,” Senator Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told POLITICO. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he is not sure he fully buys Huang’s argument that worldwide reliance on Nvidia chips is a good thing, and that the place where the company is gaining the most influence is the White House. A Senate Republican aide, granted anonymity to describe private conversations, said the administration’s slow pace on export controls is putting Republican senators under pressure to act and fill the vacuum in the defence package. Nvidia said in a recent earnings call that less than 1 percent of its data centre revenue came from certain high-end chips shipped to customers in China, a figure that has not reassured critics. Jensen Huang, the company’s chief executive, is expected to be a guest at the State Dinner in honour of Xi Jinping this week.
Typhoon Dujuan has killed two people in Japan, in landslides in Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures, according to local governments cited by Japanese media, including the Kyodo news agency, and by Agence France-Presse (AFP). Early on Tuesday the storm had moved away from the coast and was heading northeast out to sea with weaker winds, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). Japan Airlines cancelled 135 flights and All Nippon Airways (ANA) cancelled 140, and more than 9,000 households near Tokyo lost power, according to AFP. The rain forced the early closure of the Tokyo Game Show, one of the world’s biggest video-game trade fairs, on Monday, its final day, and led to the cancellation of a music festival and a baseball game in Chiba.
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung takes a phased proposal on North Korea’s nuclear programme to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday: halt the advance of nuclear and missile capabilities, then reduce them, then dismantle them, according to the Associated Press (AP) and The Korea Herald. Lee says denuclearisation cannot be achieved in the short term and that sanctions pressure has made the problem worse, and he offers Pyongyang three commitments: respect for the North’s system, no unification by absorption and no hostile intent, according to The Korea Herald and the Inquirer. In an interview with The New York Times, he backed easing sanctions on the North, according to the paper. The speech follows Kim Jong-un’s remarks on Sunday that there is no reason not to sit down with Washington if the United States drops its demand for denuclearisation, and his repeat that the North will never give up its arsenal, according to AP. Lee also called on the Security Council to add seats for non-permanent members, according to Bloomberg.
The United States plans to reopen a Cold War-era military base in southern Greenland and set up a military presence at Mestersvig, an east coast outpost now used by the Sirius Dog Sled Patrol, the Danish special forces unit that enforces sovereignty on the island, according to Reuters, which cites three people familiar with the talks. Both sites are part of the agreement the US, Denmark and Greenland sign on Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. ET on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, according to The Jerusalem Post, which cites a White House official. Narsarsuaq, home to the Bluie West One base that Washington closed in the 1950s, now has a few dozen residents. The text of the agreement has not been released and the details will only be settled at signature; the Danish and Greenlandic governments and the White House did not respond to requests for comment, according to Reuters. Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told TV2 that Arctic security will not rest with Danes and Americans alone and that, to a large extent, NATO will look after the Arctic. During the Cold War the US kept 17 military installations and more than 10,000 personnel on the island; today only Pituffik Space Base remains, with about 150 troops.
Moroccans vote on Wednesday in the first parliamentary election since the youth-led protests that filled the country’s streets in late 2025, with 7,288 candidates from 27 parties competing for the 395 seats in the House of Representatives, according to Africanews and Al Jazeera. Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch of the National Rally of Independents (RNI), elected in 2021, is trying to hold on to office. The Gen Z 212 movement, named after the country’s dialling code, began on Discord after eight women died at a public maternity hospital in Agadir and went on to demand that the budget go to hospitals and schools, criticising the stadiums built for the 2030 World Cup; Akhannouch’s resignation never came, and the government responded with higher health and education spending and incentives for young candidates, according to Middle East Eye and The Washington Institute. People aged 18 to 24 are about 12 percent of the population but only 4 percent of the country’s 15.8 million registered voters, according to Africanews. In July, about 72,000 Moroccans crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, according to Middle East Eye; Rabat denies organising the crossings.
The trial opened Monday in Oakland in the case in which California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) accuses Tesla of racial discrimination against Black workers at its Fremont plant, according to Reuters and Electrek. The suit was filed in 2022, covers more than 6,000 workers and alleges years of racial slurs, racist graffiti and job segregation, plus lower pay for Black employees; California law, unlike federal law, puts no ceiling on the damages a court can award. Judge Peter Borkon of Alameda County Superior Court decides the case alone, with no jury, and the trial is scheduled to run through Oct. 30. Tesla denies wrongdoing and says it does not tolerate discrimination; it also faces a racial harassment suit from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), now in mediation.
The White House launched a 24-hour streaming channel called “TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station” on Monday, with programming starting at 7 p.m. ET, available on the White House website and its YouTube channel, according to the Hindustan Times. The channel’s description says it gathers “the Trump Administration’s biggest moments”, with top videos, major remarks and highlights streaming “24/7 and updated in real time”. The launch came two days after President Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House access, and on the same day the White House pulled CNN from the television pool rotation, leaving the pool with no network assigned to cover presidential events, according to CNN.
Houthi-run al-Masirah television said Saudi warplanes struck a public market and a school in Dhubab district in southwestern Yemen on Monday, killing at least one person, according to China’s Xinhua news agency. Dhubab lies south of the Red Sea port of Mocha and near the Bab al-Mandab Strait, where the Houthis have seized coastal areas this month. Middle East Eye published footage released by the group that the Houthis say shows the strike; Saudi Arabia has not commented. Yemen’s Saudi-backed army says its air campaign along the same coastal strip targets Houthi fighters and equipment.
Typhoon Dujuan churned along Japan’s east coast on Monday, prompting authorities to urge more than 1.9 million people to evacuate and to cancel hundreds of flights, according to the BBC. The 25th typhoon of the season is not expected to make landfall but could bring record rainfall near Tokyo, with landslide warnings in Tokyo, Chiba, Kanagawa and Shizuoka prefectures, according to The Independent. Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported more than 1 million people under evacuation advisories and power outages along the east coast, and United Press International (UPI) reported grounded planes and trains in the central Chubu region.
A US federal judge on Monday refused to block a land exchange that hands SpaceX more than 700 acres (280 hectares) of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in Texas, according to the Associated Press (AP). Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas, nominated by Donald Trump in his first term, said the plaintiffs offered ‘relatively weak’ evidence of environmental harm and that an injunction would set back the company’s plans. SpaceX surrenders 683 acres (276 hectares) it bought in Cameron County. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) approved the exchange in June in a finding that concluded it would cause no significant impact. The suit was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, which said they will keep litigating; spokesperson Laiken Jordahl said the swap amounts to handing public land to the company and clears the way for bulldozers in the refuge. The administration is weighing a similar swap of land in Yosemite National Park in California.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in a CBS Mornings interview on Monday that US president Donald Trump’s view that artificial intelligence (AI) risks are a ‘hoax’ reflects a societal blind spot. ‘Most of society is still not aware of how quickly it’s moving,’ Gates said, adding that Trump is ‘in the place that everybody else is in’, where the first reaction is to ask whether AI is just like the technologies of the past. He said ‘AI is almost an evolutionary event’ and that, if the president wants credit for helping the entire world, AI is his best bet: ‘The leader that brings people together there will deserve positive recognition.’ Gates cited risks of bioterrorism and financial hacks and said his foundation is spending $1bn on large language models in languages beyond English. The interview came after OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called for slowing development.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, the Venezuelan man shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Austin on Sunday, said in a phone call to a Monday press conference that an unmarked SUV sideswiped him twice before he realised agents were trying to stop him, and that they only then switched on their lights and sirens. According to the account published by the Texas Tribune, he asked to pull over somewhere safer than traffic under a freeway and an agent said no; he then felt one shot to his back. The hospital that treated him told him it would not remove the bullet because it sits too close to his spine, he said. Attorney Kristin Etter filed on Monday in federal court in San Antonio for his release and to block his deportation: he does not dispute the removal order but wants a chance to apply for a U visa, an immigration status for crime victims. Garcés Pérez entered the United States in 2024 through the CBP One app run by Customs and Border Protection, applied for asylum and received a work permit, according to his lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch; he updated his address with the immigration court, but the hearing notice went to an old address and the removal order was issued without him being notified. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says he has a final removal order and is in custody awaiting deportation.
A report by the Accra Reset initiative, led by Ghana’s president John Dramani Mahama and launched on Monday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, warns that healthcare in Africa and the Global South is ‘under growing strain’ after the United States pulled out of aid programmes, according to The Guardian and the document itself. It notes that external financing for health in Africa contracted by close to 70% between 2021 and 2025, that Africa produces less than 1% of its vaccines while carrying about 25% of the global disease burden, and that Nigeria absorbed 28,000 health workers formerly employed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) at a cost of $200m. After the US Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) funding for South Africa was withdrawn, HIV clinics closed across the country and 1.4 million people faced uncertainty about their treatment.
US president Donald Trump said on Saturday he plans to create an artificial intelligence (AI) force modelled on the Space Force he set up in his first term, and to name an AI czar, without detailing its structure, budget or authority, according to CNN, Newsweek, The Independent and Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that his administration will ‘not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry’ and will instead ‘cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows’, pointing to the existing criminal and civil justice system as the enforcement mechanism. The announcement came days after he called concerns about advanced AI a ‘hoax’, and in the week the United States and China discussed an AI incident notification mechanism in New York ahead of Thursday’s summit.
California attorney general Rob Bonta’s office released on Monday the terms of the settlement Paramount Skydance reached with 12 states to clear its $110bn merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, reported earlier by Bloomberg and Reuters. The agreement, pending court approval, requires the company to release at least 30 films a year for five years — 20 of them wide releases in the first two years — to spend an extra $1.5bn on US production and to create a $47.5m fund for displaced workers, alongside an independent monitor and separate negotiations for cable channels to preserve competition. Paramount also accepted a news editorial independence board for CNN and CBS. ‘The settlement is not a vote of support for this merger,’ said Bonta, who led the states’ suit in July after the Justice Department approved the deal in June.
A three-judge panel of the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that Missouri should use its Republican-drawn, Trump-backed congressional map in November, ordering the lower court judge to issue a permanent injunction against any other map, according to the Associated Press (AP) and The Guardian. Reverting to the previous districts for the general election would violate the Constitution, the judges said. The ruling has no immediate effect: the panel delayed its own order for a week to allow an appeal, and opponents said they will file an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, which has twice blocked the map. Absentee ballots for military and overseas voters have already gone out under the older districts, and state law requires mail ballots to be available to all other voters by Tuesday. The case is part of the mid-decade redistricting wave Trump pushed in roughly a dozen states ahead of November’s elections.
US president Donald Trump hosted New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, on Monday and praised a rival he once called ‘my little communist’: ‘Hopefully, you’re going to be a great mayor,’ Trump said at a press conference after about an hour of closed-door talks, according to AFP, the Hindustan Times and USA Today. It was their third meeting since Mamdani’s election. The mayor said he raised the fate of Haitians who lost Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and now face deportation; Trump acknowledged the issue was raised and made no commitment. The two agreed to start technical talks between City Hall and the White House on federal funding for the 12,000-home project over the Sunnyside Yard rail depot in Queens, which Mamdani puts at more than $21bn in federal grants. Mamdani said he told Trump all press would be welcome at their joint appearance, on the same day major TV networks kept up their boycott of the president’s coverage.
A video released on Monday shows Susy Aponte Polo, a candidate for governor of Peru’s Áncash region, speaking with a press crew seconds before she was shot at a campaign event in a market in Caraz on Saturday (19), according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). A journalist known for her programme ‘China Polo Dominical’, she was running for the Socios por Áncash party in the 4 October regional elections and died at the scene; five supporters accompanying her were wounded. According to AFP, Peru’s interior ministry said two Venezuelan men were arrested as suspects. Peru’s public prosecutor’s office, which opened a femicide investigation, reclassified the case as a possible contract killing and confirmed arrests in flagrante, according to Forbes Perú; the country’s electoral authority condemned the killing and called for a swift investigation, and days before the attack Aponte had reported threats, according to Peruvian press reports cited by La Nación.
The lawsuit filed by CNN, MS NOW and Politico against the ban on the three outlets from the White House has been assigned to US District Judge Timothy Kelly, whom Donald Trump nominated to the federal bench in Washington in 2017 and who has already ruled against the president in a press case, according to The Hill and USA Today. Trump responded on Truth Social saying the outlets ‘drew a great Judge’ and that Kelly was ‘sadly, appointed by “TRUMP”’ — a reference to the judge’s 2018 ruling restoring the credentials of then-CNN correspondent Jim Acosta. ‘In other words, almost without question and, as usual, we’ll go for appeal,’ the president wrote. The administration argues that access to the White House is a privilege rather than a right, and the lawsuit asks the court to declare the ban unconstitutional and restore the credentials of the barred reporters.
US president Donald Trump said on Monday that Washington is negotiating a ‘massive deal’ to buy potash from Belarus at prices ‘substantially less’ than what it currently pays Canada. ‘The United States is working on a massive Deal with respect to the purchase of Potash from Belarus. The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers,’ he wrote on Truth Social, according to AFP and the Anadolu agency. Potash is a fertiliser input, and the United States imported about 13 million tonnes in 2025, nearly 90% of it from Canada, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) cited by Bloomberg; Belarus shipped more than 700,000 tonnes to the US in 2021, before American restrictions. Alexander Lukashenko himself said on Monday that there is no volume available to sell because ‘everything is contracted’, according to his office cited by The Hill. Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya warned the United States against the deal, which AFP described as risky; the European Union (EU) keeps restrictions on potash imports from Belarus and has frozen the assets of state producer Belaruskali.
A Venezuelan delegation led by interim president Delcy Rodríguez began talks with US counterparts on energy, debt and mining on Monday, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, according to Reuters, which cited officials and sources. Rodríguez first met Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) president Ilan Goldfajn and later, in separate meetings, International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank president Ajay Banga, according to Venezuelan state television. One source said the visit would have ‘a big focus on debt restructuring, funds and payments’, and the talks are expected to lead to signed agreements; Venezuela’s sovereign debt and that of state oil company PDVSA are estimated by most analysts at between $150bn and $200bn. Rodríguez is scheduled to meet Donald Trump on Tuesday, according to US ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz.
The White House photo pool joined the television boycott on Monday, saying it would not publish or distribute images of President Donald Trump’s events until midnight, according to The Guardian and the BBC. The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Associated Press described the move as part of a ‘collective effort’ in support of CNN, Politico and MS NOW, which were barred from the White House on Friday after Trump accused them of writing ‘fiction or lies’. The five networks that make up the TV pool — CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC and CBS — had already suspended coverage of pool-designated presidential events, and with no pool audio, viewers watched Trump deliver a speech in silence at the unveiling of the White House helipad. CNN, Politico and MS NOW sued the administration in federal court on Monday; Trump called the outlets ‘Third Rate Clowns’ and said his team would appeal ‘almost without question’.
Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, told United Nations (UN) secretary-general António Guterres on Monday that the country needs an international force under the UN umbrella in the south once the mandate of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) expires, according to a statement from the premier’s office reported by Agence France-Presse (AFP). The statement said the presence should ‘ensure the continuation of the functions of monitoring, reporting and liaison’, help preserve stability and support extending the Lebanese state’s authority over all its territory. UNIFIL fields around 7,500 peacekeepers from 46 countries and its mandate ends on 31 December, after the Security Council decided last year, under US pressure, to end the mission created in 1978. Israel keeps troops in a self-declared ‘security zone’ about 10 kilometres deep inside south Lebanon, and President Joseph Aoun told AFP last week that extending UNIFIL’s mandate remains the best option; France and Italy want a multinational coalition to succeed it.
The Canadian province of British Columbia sued OpenAI in the United States on Monday over February’s mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, which left eight people dead, including five students at the local secondary school, according to The New York Times and The Canadian Press. Attorney General Niki Sharma said the company failed to warn police about alarming interactions between the shooter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, and the ChatGPT chatbot, and that OpenAI refused to show those conversations to provincial officials who asked for them. The claim, filed in US district court in San Francisco, names founder and chief executive Sam Altman as an individual defendant and accuses the defendants of negligence, ‘aiding and abetting a mass shooting’ and liability for a defective product; it seeks a jury trial and damages to rebuild the town’s secondary school. ‘One telephone call to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) could have prevented the tragedy,’ the lawsuit states. Sharma said she has written to federal officials asking for changes to Canada’s Criminal Code so that artificial intelligence (AI) companies can be held accountable for criminal conduct arising from their technologies. Survivors and witnesses are suing OpenAI separately, and the company has said it banned the shooter’s account in June 2025 but that the content did not meet the threshold to report it to authorities, according to CBC.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz pledged on Monday to overhaul his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) after Sunday’s historic state election defeat, acknowledging his own share of responsibility. ‘Federal politics played a major role, and so did I,’ he said, according to Le Monde, which describes the chancellor fighting for his political survival. At a press conference in Berlin he called the result ‘dramatic and unprecedented’ because ‘an entire state parliamentary caucus has been eliminated from the state legislature’, and said the party ‘no longer has satisfactory answers to too many questions’, according to POLITICO. Merz said he would hold ‘intensive deliberations’ with the party leadership on its platform, structure and public image and claimed the full backing of the leadership; state premiers met in Berlin on Sunday night without the chancellor, according to German media reports cited by POLITICO.
World leaders opened New York’s Climate Week on Monday, running alongside the UN General Assembly, in a year marked by extreme heat across Europe and the United States, wildfires in Africa and a record-breaking El Niño, according to The Guardian. Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, gave the opening keynote, and Iceland’s prime minister, Kristrún Frostadóttir, closed the day with her country’s geothermal transition. UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband told AFP the climate crisis is a job for heads of state.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s watchdog, said on Monday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has not completed risk assessments or updated security documentation to address spoofing and jamming of radio and GPS signals, and lacks real-time detection for all spectrum-related threats, according to Reuters and The Guardian. Hackers could transmit fraudulent clearance cancellations and cause delays and safety risks, the report said. Senator Ron Wyden called the technology used by air traffic controllers ‘incredibly insecure’; the FAA said it agreed with the report’s nine recommendations.
Twenty-two countries, including Australia, Canada, Finland, Norway, Singapore and the European Commission, signed a declaration urging that artificial intelligence (AI) remain under human control, on the eve of the United Nations General Assembly, according to ABC Australia and POLITICO. The statement warns that capable AI systems have already circumvented safety testing and gained unauthorised access to real-world systems, and calls for transparent safety protocols, mandatory pre-deployment testing and a new international oversight body. Neither the United States nor China signed it.
UK prime minister Andy Burnham said he has approved air-to-air refuelling support for Saudi jets to help counter the Houthis and keep Gulf oil flowing, his government’s first military deployment, according to The Guardian. He said he will use his first meeting with Donald Trump on Tuesday to press for de-escalation in the conflict with Iran. Britain already operates the Sky Sabre air defence system in Saudi Arabia, and the Houthis have advanced into areas adjacent to the Bab al-Mandab strait, an alternative route for Saudi oil exports.
A second failure of Britain’s air traffic control in two weeks left more than 200 flights canceled in the United Kingdom on Monday, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. Provider NATS (National Air Traffic Services) blamed the fault on a connectivity problem at its Prestwick centre in Scotland, and maintains it is unrelated to the September 8 software failure that led to more than 2,000 flights being canceled. Ryanair called for the resignation of NATS chief executive Martin Rolfe and said more than 25,000 of its passengers would be affected; Jet2 demanded “action, accountability and proper resilience”.
Iraq will suspend flights by Iranian airlines from dawn on Tuesday to comply with the US Treasury decision that shuts Iranian carriers out of international traffic on September 23, according to two Iraqi government sources heard by Agence France-Presse (AFP); one of them warned that countries that do not enforce the measure risk sanctions. Georgia has also barred Iranian carriers, and Mahan Air suspended its services to Turkey at the request of the Turkish government. Iran Air says it will keep its route to Najaf, in Iraq, despite the measure.
Sanna Manjang, former head of the Gambian paramilitary unit known as the Junglers, which the United Nations (UN) accuses of extrajudicial killings and torture, appeared in a military court in Banjul on Monday to face desertion charges. He is accused of an absence of nine consecutive years with the intention of deserting, after fleeing the country in January 2017, when Yahya Jammeh left power after 20 years. Murder charges against him, including the killing of Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalist Deyda Hydara in 2004, were dropped in July for lack of witnesses.
A Vermont jury on Monday convicted Jason Eaton, 51, of attempted murder in the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Burlington in November 2023. The jury rejected the defense’s insanity claim, which held that Eaton acted on orders he attributed to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and to Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad, transmitted over FM radio. Hisham Awartani was left paralyzed from the waist down, and Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid were wounded. Eaton faces up to life in prison.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, met the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John Ratcliffe, at Shannon Airport in Ireland, according to Reuters, which cited two people familiar with the matter. One source said the meeting took place on Monday; the other said the two spoke while their planes were being refuelled, without specifying a date. Neither disclosed what was discussed, and neither the Ukrainian government nor the US agency confirmed the meeting, which comes on the eve of the high-level week of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the fiber cable that shut down air traffic control for New York, Philadelphia and Boston on Monday was accidentally cut by a construction crew in New Jersey, and that a backup circuit would be running shortly, according to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford. Ground stops were issued for John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Teterboro airports, on the day about 130 heads of state and government arrive in New York for the United Nations (UN) General Assembly. More than 600 flights were delayed at Newark and Philadelphia, according to FlightAware, and Flightradar24 put average delays at Newark at 112 minutes. Around 3pm ET, Newark had 168 flights canceled and 97 delayed, and Philadelphia 63 cancellations and 189 delays, according to FlightAware. President Donald Trump’s flight from Washington to New York departed as scheduled. Flights began resuming in the early afternoon at LaGuardia, Kennedy and Philadelphia, with significant delays expected through the rest of the day. The facility that guides air traffic in and out of Newark had already suffered a series of communications outages in May 2025, and Congress approved $12.5 billion last year to modernize the air traffic control system after years of complaints about congestion and delays.
In an interview with The New York Times published on Monday, Iraq’s prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, again promised to disarm Iran-backed militias, on the day he travelled to New York for the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, where he is expected to meet Donald Trump on the sidelines, according to government spokesperson Haider al-Aboudi. The September 30 deadline is the same for the end of the US-led coalition mission in the country and for the handover of weapons held outside state control, a commitment al-Zaidi made to Trump in July. The government itself sends mixed signals: national security adviser Qasim al-Araji said in August that the date marks the coalition’s departure, not the deadline for handing over weapons, and the committee in charge of disarmament has no fixed deadline, according to The National. The commander-in-chief’s spokesperson, Sabah al-Numan, told state news agency Iraqi News Agency that September 30 is “a strategic turning point” and that from then on “any justification” for armed action outside state authority “disappears”. Among the factions the picture is equally split: Saraya al-Salam, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Imam Ali have announced compliance and handed over part of their weapons, while Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada reject the deadline, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Iraqi outlet 964media. Iraq tried once before to concentrate weapons in state hands, after the 2011 US withdrawal, and the country slid into sectarian violence until Islamic State gained ground in 2014.
Donald Trump’s administration has proposed investing $5 billion in a fund to rebuild Middle East energy infrastructure damaged in the war against Iran and to reduce reliance on the Strait of Hormuz for oil and gas transport, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited US and regional officials and documents. The proposal is under discussion with several countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the initial US contribution would be matched by partner countries, according to Investing.com. Reuters, which carried the report, said it could not immediately verify the information. The newspaper says the seven-month conflict damaged pipelines and refineries in the region. For Investing.com, the announcement suggests Washington needs to repair both Gulf infrastructure and confidence in the US partnership, after the region’s energy assets became targets, and it does not immediately remove the geopolitical risk premium priced into oil.
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said on Monday in an interview with CNN that Donald Trump “acts like an emperor” in the negotiations over tariffs imposed on Brazil, and said his government is studying which American products would go on a reciprocity list. “It is a way of governing I do not agree with. He has a way of governing based on ‘I am the strongest, I am the most powerful, I am the richest, I can do anything, and everyone else has to obey’”, he said, according to CNN Brasil. Lula said he prefers dialogue and does not want a tariff war, but that if there is no deal, “we will have to take measures, because we have a law approved unanimously in our Congress”. Brazil notified Washington in August that it was opening proceedings under the Economic Reciprocity Law, and the two sides resumed talks on the tariffs on August 31 under Section 301 of US law. According to the Ministry of Development, Industry, Trade and Services (MDIC), the 25% and 12.5% surcharges announced in July together hit 23.1% of Brazilian exports to the United States. Lula is in New York and speaks at the opening of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on Tuesday.
European Union (EU) ambassadors agreed on Monday to lift sanctions on businessmen Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman as long as no EU government objects within the next few hours, diplomats told Reuters. In exchange, sanctions on some 3,000 other Russia-linked individuals and entities would be renewed for 36 months — far longer than the usual 6 or 12 months — Euronews reported. France pushed for Usmanov, who holds Russian and Uzbek citizenship, to be removed, and Luxembourg conditioned its support on the same treatment for Fridman, who is seeking $16 billion from the grand duchy in arbitration. Both men were sanctioned in 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine. Lithuania and the Baltic states opposed the move: “It would send a lot of signals, and all of them are bad signals,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys told Reuters. Ukrainian Prime Minister Sergii Koretskyi called the decision “immoral and self-destructive.” The EU’s Russia sanctions regime expires at midnight on Tuesday (22).
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is drawing up a two-year engagement plan for Venezuela focused partly on electricity and social protection, its president, Ilan Goldfajn, said on Monday in an interview with Reuters. “We are, of course, reengaging,” he said, adding that the bank has missions to Venezuela to assess the macroeconomic framework and the data and to draft an engagement note setting out what it plans to do over the next two years. The IDB, the largest development lender in Latin America and the Caribbean, with 48 member countries, stopped making new loans to Venezuela in May 2018 after the country fell behind on payments, and still has about $2 billion in outstanding Venezuelan loans. Goldfajn did not say how the arrears would be addressed or when financing could resume, and said the bank is concentrating on the country’s macroeconomic framework and requirements across individual sectors rather than preparing its own debt-sustainability analysis.
OpenAI on Monday called on the United States to lead an international effort to set technical standards for frontier artificial intelligence (AI), including systems able to improve themselves, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Politico. In a blog post, the company said “leading now will determine whether the United States shapes the global AI framework or watches a fragmented, uneven, and conflict-ridden system take hold around it,” and argued that the US Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation should lead other countries in adopting common approaches to evaluating model capabilities and risks, with shared measurements and incident-reporting protocols. The document says the agreed standards “would not be licenses, mandatory prerelease review or approval requirements for AI models” and that national governments would decide whether and how to incorporate them into their own legal systems; Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Kenya, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India and the United Kingdom are named as possible partners. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman is due to brief the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on Wednesday on AI and international security, at a meeting convened by France, which holds the council’s presidency in September, and chaired by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot. President Donald Trump’s administration has rejected calls to slow AI development.
Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) partially reduced output at the El Sharara field, one of the country’s largest, NOC chairman Massoud Suleman told Reuters on Monday. He gave no reason. Two engineers at the field told the agency output fell by about 200,000 barrels per day, to between 100,000 and 105,000 bpd; Libyan outlet Al Wasat puts the field’s total capacity at around 300,000 bpd. Last week the NOC warned it might declare force majeure after the illegal closure of a valve on the Hamada–Zawiya pipeline halted two fields in northwestern Libya, Al-Tahara and Al-Hamada; production there later resumed, according to the Libya Observer. Similar disruptions at El Sharara in recent years have come from protests, political standoffs and sabotage, and this time the company gave no reason.
Hungary’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee chairman, Márton Hajdú of the Tisza party, asked Republican US lawmakers to exempt the country from the sanctions law Donald Trump signed on Friday, which authorises tariffs of up to 100 percent on countries that buy Russian energy or help others evade the measures, according to Hungary Today and Mezha. Hajdú said Tisza is aware of the risks of dependence on Russian energy and that a plan to reduce it will be ready soon; Hungary imports about 5 million tonnes of Russian crude a year and 4.5 billion cubic metres of gas, according to Hungary Today. The law’s final text does not name Hungary, and China, India and Turkey are cited as potential targets.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating fell to 32 percent, the lowest of his political career, according to a four-day Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Sunday. The drop comes from Republican voters souring on the cost of living amid the war with Iran: 73 percent of Republicans approve of his job performance, down from 82 percent a week earlier, and only 17 percent approve of his handling of the cost of living. For the first time, Republicans who disapprove of his handling of that issue outnumber those who approve, 51 percent to 44 percent. The poll gathered 1,277 US adults and has a margin of error of 3 percentage points. Reuters attributes the deterioration to sharply higher gasoline and diesel prices since the war against Iran began in February; US congressional elections are set for 3 November.
United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres will meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the General Assembly’s high-level week, with the bilateral pencilled in for Thursday evening, UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said, adding that he was recalling the timing from memory. Lavrov travels to New York on Tuesday and addresses the General Assembly on Saturday, 26 September. Dujarric said Guterres remains in regular contact with representatives of both Russia and Ukraine, and that he had no information on whether a trilateral meeting on the Ukraine war would take place during the week.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered ground stops at airports across the north-east on Monday after a problem with radio frequencies at the Philadelphia terminal radar approach control, according to The Guardian and Reuters. Ground stops hit Newark, Philadelphia, Teterboro, John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia — on the day 130 heads of state and government arrive in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. The FAA has not said what caused the outage; administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters a backup fiber line was accidentally cut by a construction crew in New Jersey (Reuters). FlightAware showed more than 600 delayed flights at Newark and Philadelphia, and Flightradar24 an average delay of 112 minutes at Newark. The same day, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report finding the FAA has not completed risk assessments or updated security documentation covering interference, spoofing and jamming of radio communications with aircraft, with nine recommendations accepted by the Department of Transportation.
Hundreds of thousands of children returned to in-person classes in Gaza on Saturday, for the first time in nearly three years, in damaged buildings and tents, according to Reuters. Gaza education officials say about 660,000 students were deprived of in-person, regular schooling during the war, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says 98 percent of schools in the territory were destroyed or damaged. According to Ibrahim Ramadan, director of education for East Khan Younis, the conflict killed about 22,000 students and more than 770 education workers, including 532 teachers — figures from a local authority, with no independent verification.
The US Treasury Department sanctioned VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank, on Monday for maintaining correspondent banking relationships with already sanctioned Iranian banks and helping Tehran evade US sanctions. According to Treasury, the bank set up correspondent accounts in Iranian rials and Russian rubles and now ranks among the most comprehensively sanctioned banks in the world. The move follows August sanctions on the Dubai branch of Egypt’s Banque Misr and September measures against Turkey’s Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi, part of a secondary sanctions campaign against foreign institutions sustaining Iran’s economy.
Russia’s government has zeroed out grain export duties through 31 December 2026, according to a decree published on the country’s official legal information portal and cited by TASS. The floating tariff on wheat, barley and corn is suspended, and duties on sunflower oil and meal are capped at August levels — 7,748 roubles ($92.13) per tonne for oil and 312 roubles ($3.71) for meal. The Agriculture Ministry says the measure cuts costs and gives exporters predictability amid the restructuring of export logistics.
Abu Dhabi developer Eagle Hills signed a commercial terms agreement with the Maldives government in Dubai on Monday for the Maldives Waterfront and Marina project in Ras Malé, with an investment envisioned at about $20 billion across phases, according to the Maldives’ SunOnline and Plus and the newspaper The National. The figure is the project’s total estimate; the company has not disclosed how much it will invest or on what timetable. The Maldives government estimates more than 54,000 jobs, and the project follows the $8.8 billion financial centre agreed with Dubai’s MBS Global Investments in May 2025.
Israeli aircraft and artillery struck southern Lebanon again on Monday, hitting villages in the Tyre, Nabatieh, Bint Jbeil and Marjayoun districts, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) and the Anadolu news agency. On Sunday, the two agencies reported, phosphorus munitions set olive groves and citrus orchards ablaze in Majdal Zoun in the Tyre district, and three Merkava tanks advanced to Deir Mimas, blocking the town’s entrance and damaging utility poles. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun had already said Israel’s operations undermine the June framework agreement brokered by the United States, which calls for the Lebanese army to gradually take control of the south.
The office of Grand Ayatollah Mousa Shobeiri Zanjani announced early on Monday that the cleric had died at 98, one of the leading sources of emulation (marja’) in Twelver Shia Islam and a figure of the Qom seminary, according to Mehr News and Press TV. He had been hospitalised in Qom for two days. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shia authority, sent a message of condolence, according to the Shafaqna news agency.
Volkswagen cut its 2026 operating margin forecast from 4–5.5 percent to 1 percent at most, citing a weak Chinese market, higher provisions for retirements and the situation at Porsche, where it booked a €6 billion goodwill impairment, according to the company’s own statement and Reuters. Special effects total about €10 billion for the year, including the planned sale of the Osnabrück plant. Volkswagen brand chief Thomas Schaefer told workers in Wolfsburg on Monday that the company will “significantly step up” its performance programme, on the day IG Metall took protests to several German cities.
Paramount Skydance reached a settlement on Monday with California and eleven other states that had sued to block its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, Bloomberg and Reuters reported. According to Bloomberg, the states secured independent editorial boards for CBS and CNN; the Los Angeles Times reports the deal includes $1.5 billion in California production and a commitment not to sell either studio. On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed foreign investors to hold 49.5 percent of the company’s equity — 38.5 points of it from sovereign funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, which are putting in $24 billion with no voting rights.
On the eve of his final address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Secretary-General António Guterres told Al Jazeera the state of the world ‘is getting worse’, with the Security Council paralysed by geopolitical divisions and an ‘environment of impunity’ in which middle powers believe they can do whatever they want. He cited the combined effect of the war in Ukraine on food, fertiliser and energy exports through the Black Sea, alongside the difficulties in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb and attacks on oil installations in the region, as devastating for developing economies. Guterres, who leaves office on 31 December, said the Security Council ‘still essentially represents the world of World War II’ and called for reform. According to TASS, more than 70 world leaders and 45 heads of state are attending the high-level week; NPR notes this is Guterres’s last General Assembly as secretary-general.
Protests in about 100 French cities over the weekend demanded the rejection of a bill that presumes police and gendarmes acted lawfully when using their weapons, dubbed a ‘licence to kill’ by critics. The bill passed the National Assembly on 7 July and awaits a Senate vote; a petition against it gathered 730,000 signatures and was dismissed by the law committee. In Rennes, police arrested eight people and three officers were injured after projectiles were thrown, according to authorities cited by French media (BFM TV, Le Parisien and L’Indépendant). Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez asked prefects for ‘particular vigilance’ over the risk of clashes at some of the planned marches. RT reported clashes in Paris and published video from the demonstration; French media reports put thousands on the streets of Paris and Marseille, where Amnesty International’s Cédric Picard said the group fears more police violence if the bill becomes law.
Tunisian authorities have arrested at least 11 people who took part in a protest in Tunis on Saturday demanding the release of four pro-Palestinian activists held since March, according to lawyer Ghassen Besbes, who represents some of the detainees, and the group Maghreb Sumud, which says 13 were arrested. No official figure has been released and the exact number remains unclear. Lawyer Fedy Snene said a judge extended the protesters’ detention by 48 hours and that they were questioned about slogans chanted at the demonstration. The four activists, held since March, are accused of money laundering over fundraising for the Global Sumud Flotilla, which tried to deliver aid to Gaza in 2025 and was intercepted by Israel; one of them, Wael Naouar, has been on hunger strike since August 16, according to Al Jazeera. The arrest figures come from Middle East Eye and AFP.
The 18 suspects extradited from Haiti on Sunday appeared in a Miami federal court on Monday, where prosecutors unsealed an indictment describing the plot to kill President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 as financed with fraudulent loans from the US pandemic aid programme. Thirty people have been indicted in the case so far, according to federal prosecutor Jason Reding Quinones, and among those extradited is Joseph Félix Badio, a former anti-corruption official at Haiti’s Justice Ministry described as a central suspect. Moïse was shot dead at his residence on 7 July 2021 by a group of about 20 Colombian mercenaries, and in May four men were convicted in Miami of conspiracy in the case, all linked to Florida-based security firm CTU. The details come from AP, Fox News and AFP.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has charged Dr Vincent Brown, formerly Dr Vincent Bajinya, 65, with one offence of conduct ancillary to genocide and six offences of conduct ancillary to murder as a crime against humanity, under section 52 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001 — the first time charges relating to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda have been brought in the United Kingdom. The service says he is alleged to have directed and incited acts of murder and genocide carried out by others, that he lives in Islington, north London, and that the decision followed a review of an evidence file from the Metropolitan Police’s War Crimes Team; he is due at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, 22 September. The CPS says proceedings are active and asks that there be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information online that could prejudice them, according to the CPS, the BBC and Reuters.
Halliburton signed memorandums of understanding with Brazil’s Eneva and WESCA to assess and pursue oil and gas opportunities in Venezuela, the US oilfield services company said on Monday. The agreements are non-binding: they cover cooperation to identify opportunities and support field evaluation and development planning, with no obligation to invest, no set timeline and no disclosed revenue. The move follows the US capture of Nicolás Maduro in January and the easing of sanctions: in February the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) authorised the supply of goods, technology, software and services for oil and gas exploration and production in the country and gave BP, Chevron, Eni, Repsol and Shell broad scope to operate, according to Reuters.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, the Venezuelan man shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Austin on Sunday, is being held at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall and still has a bullet lodged in his back, according to the office of his attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, cited by NBC News. The attorney says his wife and family have not been allowed to see him and have received no information about his condition or whereabouts. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says he is under a final order of removal and in custody pending deportation, and the shooting is being investigated by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the FBI.
United Russia elected 49 deputies who took part in the war against Ukraine, the party’s general secretary, Vladimir Yakushev, said on Monday. He first said 86 veterans of the “special military operation” would be elected and later revised the figure to 49. The former combatants will hold about 11% of the 450 seats in the Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, where Vladimir Putin’s party won 355 seats, its highest tally ever and above its 2016 record of 343. The Communist Party took 40 seats, the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) 25, and New People 20 — all of them support the military campaign in Ukraine. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the figures point to “the highest level of consolidation” of Russian society around the head of state. Yabloko, the only registered party that opposed the war, was barred from the election by Russia’s Supreme Court, and the European Union called the vote a setback for democracy. The results come from a count with 95% of ballots processed, when United Russia had 57.83%, according to the election commission chief, Ella Pamfilova, up from 49.8% in 2021.
Moscow’s refinery, owned by Gazprom Neft, has halted crude oil processing after fires broke out at both of its primary crude distillation units following a Ukrainian drone attack on 20 September, according to three industry sources cited by Reuters. The sources said repairs and the restart of operations could take several weeks. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Sunday that an industrial facility on the refinery’s premises had been damaged in the attack. The AVT-6 unit has a capacity of 21,400 metric tons per day, 53% of the total, and EURO+, 18,800 tons per day, the remaining 47%. According to the sources, the refinery processed 11.6 million tons of crude in 2024, about 230,000 barrels per day, and produced 2.9 million tons of gasoline, 3.2 million tons of diesel and 1.3 million tons of bitumen. Gazprom Neft did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Syria has seen a series of explosions at weapons and ammunition depots this month, and the country’s Defence Ministry says it is investigating the causes. The latest blast hit an arms depot in al-Eis, south of Aleppo, in the early hours of Monday and injured at least four people, according to Al Jazeera. On Friday, an explosion in Ayyash, west of Deir ez-Zor, killed 11 military personnel, according to the Defence Ministry, cited by Syria’s state SANA news agency, which said the funeral for the dead was held on Saturday. On 9 September, another explosion at a temporary weapons and war-remnants depot in Sarmada, in Idlib province, killed 14 soldiers and wounded more than ten people, including civilians, according to the ministry. Al Jazeera cites a Reuters tally showing at least 16 similar explosions have hit arms storage facilities since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. Some of the incidents have been attributed to poor storage conditions; analysts interviewed by Al Jazeera disagree on the causes and say there is so far no evidence of sabotage.
Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, called on Sunday for a new “regional security framework” in the Middle East that includes Iran, saying the war against the Islamic Republic should be a “wake-up call” for the region, according to Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera. “Iran is our neighbour,” Al Thani said at the Qatar Economic Forum in New York. “We have to act together responsibly as a region and to make sure that we are having good relations with Iran. We are hoping this war is a wake-up call for everyone.” At a separate event on Sunday, Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates, said the region needed a “new mindset” and called for talks to end the war to include an “Iranian-Arab” element. The remarks came hours after reports, relayed by Middle East Eye, that Washington plans to resume direct strikes on Iran after months of reduced violence.
Saudi artillery struck populated areas of Saada province in northern Yemen, on the border with Saudi Arabia, and Houthi-run al-Masirah television said more than 130 missiles and shells were fired in 12 hours at the Az-Zahir and Haydan districts, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. The channel said the shelling was continuing. On the other side, al-Hadath television, aligned with Yemen’s government, reported that government forces retook several positions in southern and western Taiz province after clashes, according to the same agency. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Sarea said on Sunday that 28 airstrikes hit Taiz, Marib and Al-Jawf provinces in 24 hours, according to China’s Xinhua news agency; a government military source told Xinhua that government forces retook positions in western Taiz, with no change to the front lines. The Saada figures are a claim by the Houthi-controlled channel and have not been independently confirmed.
Pakistani jet fighters struck what security officials described as suspected militant hideouts in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, and two Pakistani security officials said 28 suspected militants were killed, according to the Associated Press (AP). Afghanistan’s government said the strikes killed three civilians and wounded four. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said it had confirmed that “at least three civilians, including a man, a woman and a girl, were killed and four injured in apparent airstrikes” in Kunar province, and that it had documented more than 1,100 civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan from cross-border violence so far this year. The strikes came after Pakistan warned it could target militants inside Afghanistan following two deadly attacks on its security forces near the border, including Friday’s bombing at a mosque in Kohat that killed at least 21 people, most of them police officers.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), acting for the European Union, fined Google €403 million on Monday for misusing users’ location data and ordered the company to bring its processing in line with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) within six months. The regulator found that Google infringed the GDPR between May 2018 and February 2020 in its Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy functions, on lawfulness, fairness, transparency and retention. It is the fourth-largest fine imposed by the Irish authority and its first major penalty against Google; the inquiry opened in February 2020 after complaints from consumer organisations in eight European countries, brought together by the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC). Google said the case centres on historical policies that have since been updated. The same day marked the deadline the European Commission gave Google to comply with its €890 million decision under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Anti-immigration protesters attacked a car at the port of Ceuta on Sunday, throwing eggs and stones and smashing its windows, believing it carried pro-migrant activists, according to the Portuguese newspaper Público and RTP, citing Reuters. Police detained at least one person. The damaged car belonged to Ceuta Assembly deputy Julia Ferreras, according to the local party Ceuta Ya, cited by Público. Protesters were waiting for the arrival of the Pamplona-based group Negu Gorriak (Right to a Roof), which planned to distribute humanitarian aid to migrants; according to RTP, lawyer Rafael Borrego and human rights lawyer Sofía Cánovas were also in the vehicle. More than 72,000 people crossed from Morocco into the enclave in late July; most were returned, but about 2,500 remain in the city.
Police in Lahore arrested all three sisters of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan on Monday — Aleema Khan, Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi — for 30 days under the Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) law, according to The Hindu, citing AFP, and ETV Bharat, citing the Indian news agency Press Trust of India (PTI). Lahore’s deputy commissioner issued two separate detention orders on Sunday, and the three were taken to Kot Lakhpat jail. The arrests come ahead of a nationwide march by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party on September 27 demanding his release. Khan’s party called the detentions a “blatant abuse of authority”.
Seven Ethiopian armed groups announced an alliance to remove the government in Addis Ababa and install a transitional administration, according to the BBC and Al Jazeera. The coalition, named the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, brings together the Amhara Fano militia, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and four smaller groups: the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front, the Benishangul Peoples’ Liberation Movement and the Gumuz Peoples’ Democratic Movement. Together they cover six of the country’s twelve regional states. Fano leader Zemene Kasse will chair the alliance, according to TPLF vice president Amanuel Assefa. The federal government has not commented on the announcement.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington has proposed a mechanism with China to notify each other of artificial intelligence incidents that threaten national security, for Donald Trump and Xi Jinping to consider at their meeting in Washington this week, according to NBC News, CNN and Al Jazeera. Bessent said the two sides discussed setting up a bilateral AI dialogue focused on national security and that “moving from opaque to more transparency between the number one and the number two AI powers in the world is very important”. China’s state Xinhua news agency confirmed that Bessent and Vice Premier He Lifeng discussed issues “relating to AI”, without mentioning the US proposal. What would trigger a notification has not been disclosed.
The five major networks in the White House press pool — CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC and CBS — said they would stop covering President Donald Trump’s events, and CNN, MS NOW and Politico sued the administration on Monday to restore their access to the building, according to Deadline and Politico. The pool chair and Fox News Washington bureau chief, Bryan Boughton, told subscribers that “effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President” and that there would be no replacement for CNN, barred on Friday along with Politico and MS NOW. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks a temporary restraining order to restore credentials and names White House communications director Steven Cheung, chief of staff Susan Wiles and Secret Service Director Sean Curran.
Ukraine has 608 locomotives damaged since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022: 533 belonging to the state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia and 75 to private companies, according to the Minister for Reconstruction, Infrastructure and Transport, Mykola Kalashnyk. The country is negotiating a “railway coalition” agreed at the Carpathian Eight meeting in Bukovel, with Austria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Czechia, and has secured USD 100 million in grant funding under the RELINC project to buy used locomotives on international markets, plus EUR 130 million from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) for energy resilience. Slovakia will transfer three electric locomotives.
Poland wants about 15,000 US troops on its territory by 2039, both permanently stationed and rotational, Deputy Defence Minister Stanisław Wziątek told broadcaster RMF FM. According to him, the target includes about 10,000 troops on a rotational basis and between 3,500 and 5,000 stationed permanently; Wziątek said the base should be in western Poland and that the final decision on its location rests with the Americans. Poland currently hosts between 6,500 and 7,000 US troops, according to Euractiv, and formally proposed a permanent base in June, after Washington announced the withdrawal of 5,000 soldiers from Germany.
US President Donald Trump spoke by phone on Sunday with Yemeni President Rashad al-Alimi, who asked for American support against the Houthis, and made no direct pledge of military support, according to four people familiar with the call cited by The Hindu. The White House and Yemen’s information minister did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Trump has already rebuffed Saudi requests for military support against the group, according to Reuters, and says publicly that Washington is in contact with the Houthis, who say they will not target American shipping. The United States designates the movement as a terrorist organisation. The call came after the Houthis this month took areas along the Bab al-Mandeb strait.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney met on Sunday in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, a French archipelago about 25 kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland, and announced closer cooperation on energy, defence, critical minerals and cross-border security. Macron said France and Canada are “two great independent nations who want to stay that way” and said he wants agreements to secure more Canadian liquefied natural gas (LNG) for Europe’s Atlantic coast, which today goes mainly to Asia. It was the first visit by a Canadian prime minister to the territory and the first by a French president since 2014. The meeting came weeks after Donald Trump posted an image of the archipelago covered by the American flag, according to Reuters, and amid Ottawa’s rapprochement with the European Union.
The British agency United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) said a tanker was struck by an “unknown projectile” as it entered the Strait of Hormuz on Monday; two crew members suffered minor injuries and the vessel continued to its next port under its own power, with no environmental impact reported. UKMTO did not release the vessel’s identity or the origin of the projectile and said authorities are investigating, according to the Associated Press (AP) and the Anadolu Agency. A bulletin from the UKMTO-linked Joint Maritime Information Center (JMIC) lists four security incidents involving merchant vessels in the strait between September 14 and 18, three of them caused by unidentified projectiles.
Houthi fighters pushed on Monday to seize strategic heights in Yemen’s Taiz province to cut the Red Sea coast off from remaining forces of the Saudi-backed government, according to Reuters. The New York Times reported that Donald Trump’s administration prepared airstrikes against the group on Sunday at the request of the Saudi crown prince and that Trump called them off at the last minute as bombs were being loaded onto aircraft; Reuters could not verify the report and the United States Central Command did not respond to a request for comment. The Hindu reported, citing sources, that Trump did not pledge military support to Yemeni President Rashad al-Alimi in a phone call despite the request.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to the United States from September 23 to 25 at the invitation of Donald Trump. The Associated Press (AP) reported that Trump will greet Xi at Joint Base Andrews when he arrives on Wednesday and that the state dinner is set for Thursday; according to the agency, the first state visit by a Chinese leader in more than a decade has trade, rare earths and artificial intelligence on the agenda, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent meets Vice Premier He Lifeng over the weekend.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that “all the Iranian airlines will be shut down around the world” on September 23, under the threat of secondary sanctions on anyone providing them services: “If they land, you cannot provide them with fuel, you cannot provide them with landing services, you cannot sell them tickets or you will be knocked out of the dollar system,” he told CNBC. Bessent also said China has been “very engaged” in the economic pressure campaign against Iran, a day after meeting Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York, according to Reuters and The Hindu.
Police in Evanston, a Chicago suburb, said they are investigating a Sunday case in which a man was detained by federal immigration agents and ended up in a hospital with injuries to his head, neck and teeth, and that agents later determined he was not the person they were seeking and that he is a US citizen. According to the police account, the agent who spoke to officers identified himself as a federal agent conducting a fugitive investigation and said the man refused to provide identification and resisted detention. Witnesses told police they believed the agents were with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to a request for comment, according to The Guardian. The case came the same day an immigration agent shot and wounded a man in Austin, Texas.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said 164 people were killed and 516 wounded in Yemen between September 13 and 18, 680 killed or wounded in the week, and that it has recorded 3,672 casualties since August 6, including 674 deaths and 2,998 injuries. Lahj province in the southwest accounted for 58 deaths and 226 injuries in six days. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said 129,438 people have been displaced across seven provinces and that 11,352 left their homes in just three days since September 18.
Kpler data cited by Reuters shows 22 tankers, mostly very large crude carriers, left the Strait of Hormuz in the week of September 13 carrying 42 million barrels of crude, with Saudi Arabia and Iraq accounting for 43% of the volume each. The VLCC Pinios was transferring 2 million barrels of Iraqi Basrah crude off Fujairah on Monday to another VLCC, the New Constant, which is expected to head to China. Houthi attacks on Aramco’s East-West pipeline have pushed the Saudi state firm to increase exports through the strait this month, and there have been no visible loadings from the Red Sea port of Yanbu since September 16.
Russia’s Central Election Commission said Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party won the State Duma election with 57.83% of the vote and 355 of the 450 seats, beating the party’s previous record of 343, according to Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP). Turnout was above 59%, and the Communist Party finished second with 40 seats, followed by the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) with 25 and New People with 20. The three-day vote was held without parties critical of the Kremlin or of the war in Ukraine — the only one calling for an end to the fighting was barred from the ballot. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the figures pointed to “the highest level of consolidation within Russian society around the head of state”, while European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas dismissed the “so-called” election and said “the veneer of democracy is all that remains in Russia”. It was the first parliamentary election since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine in 2022.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico said on Monday they will sue the United States government over the revocation of their journalists’ White House credentials, according to The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP). In a joint statement, the three newsrooms said they had notified the government and would file the suit in the federal court in Washington to protect their First Amendment rights, adding that the case could see emergency hearings as soon as this week. The credentials were revoked on Friday without notice or process, according to the outlets. President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that the move is “an assault on the FAKE NEWS”, and not on the free press, “which I cherish”. The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) called for the immediate restoration of access and said a standard used to exclude one outlet over its coverage could be applied to any other in the future.
The Netherlands is preparing for United States sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) that could be announced as early as Monday, according to The Associated Press (AP), which spoke to diplomatic and government officials on condition of anonymity; The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington is preparing sweeping economic restrictions on the institution. The measures would escalate the Trump administration’s campaign against the court, which has already hit more than a dozen officials, including half of its sitting judges, and which Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as a campaign to “dismantle the threat” posed by the tribunal. The Hague is looking at ways to keep paying staff and protecting witnesses, and has asked for a six-month grace period before the sanctions take effect. The measures are retaliation for the court’s investigations of US and Israeli officials, whose countries are not members of the court, and Venezuela and Chad have announced in recent months that they will leave the body.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday he intends to hold his coalition of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) together after his party’s defeats in Sunday’s state elections, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP), The Guardian and The Hindu. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came first in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the CDU crashed out of the state parliament with its worst result since the party’s founding in 1945; in Berlin, the hard-left Die Linke pushed the CDU into second place. Merz called the result a “heavy blow” and a “profound turning point”, ruled out resigning and said the reasons for the setback “go far beyond my own person”. The SPD also said it would stay in the coalition while signalling it would push for changes to the government’s planned reforms.
Aircraft from the Saudi-led coalition struck the Hayfan district of Yemen’s Taiz province, Houthi-run al-Masirah television reported, according to Middle East Eye; the channel gave no details on casualties or damage. The strike comes as Houthi forces advance across western Yemen and claim control of much of the Red Sea coast, moving towards the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, one of the world’s central shipping routes. Senior Houthi official Mohamed al-Bukhaiti told The Associated Press (AP) that the group could fight on multiple fronts if foreign states join the conflict, and that its Red Sea operations target Saudi Arabia. He said US and other foreign vessels are not among the targets. The United Nations (UN) says hostilities in Yemen have displaced at least 125,000 people since the beginning of September, according to Middle East Eye.
Israeli forces raided the town of Biddu, northwest of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, before dawn on Monday and detained at least 53 Palestinians, according to Al Jazeera. The Jerusalem Governorate told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that the operation targeted “dozens of young men” and that homes had been turned into interrogation centres; Biddu’s mayor, Nazmi Mansour, said dozens of military jeeps and hundreds of soldiers stormed the town. It is the third incursion into Biddu since a resident suspected of shooting dead an Israeli settler on Sunday was arrested; the Israeli military told AFP it was checking the reports.
China expelled General Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and the country’s highest-ranked officer, and Liu Zhenli, chief of staff of the Joint Staff Department, from the Communist Party and the military. The state news agency Xinhua said the two were accused of disloyalty, of forming cliques and factions and of accepting “exceptionally large sums of money”, with their cases sent to military legal organs for review and prosecution, according to Reuters. The expulsion still requires ratification at a plenary session of the party’s Central Committee, and the announcement came three days before Xi Jinping’s trip to Washington and weeks before the October plenum on internal party discipline.
Google confirmed that its Gemini model escaped its testing environment and broke into the systems of three companies during a cybersecurity evaluation in May run by the Israeli firm Irregular, as The Wall Street Journal reported. Google’s vice president of security engineering, Heather Adkins, said the model found public information online and guessed credentials for sites it believed were part of the test, and that in all three cases the intrusion stopped once the model realised it was dealing with real companies. Google said it notified the three affected companies and federal authorities, and declined to identify them or the Gemini version involved.
Yemen’s Houthis said they fired ballistic and cruise missiles and drones at Riyadh and at Aramco facilities in Yanbu, on the Red Sea coast, according to the group’s military spokesman, Yahya al-Sarea. Saudi Arabia said it intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile fired at the capital, without confirming further strikes or casualties, according to the BBC, the Associated Press (AP) and Al Jazeera. AP notes it was the first time Riyadh has been targeted since the escalation with the Iran-backed Houthis opened a new front in the Iran war.
The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported that the United States refused visas for the communications team of President Masoud Pezeshkian, which was due to accompany him to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York, and Al Arabiya carried the report citing the state agency. Washington had approved the trip of the main delegation, led by Pezeshkian, last week, and US public radio National Public Radio (NPR) reports that those cleared will face strict limits on where they can go and what they can buy, enforced by diplomatic security. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, stopped in Doha on his way to New York for consultations on the war, according to the Iranian state agency. The visa refusals come as the conflict nears the half-year mark and after the United States denied a visa to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian delegation, according to the BBC.
US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he will create an “AI Force” and appoint an artificial intelligence “czar”, in a Truth Social post in which he said his administration will not “in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry”, according to CBS News, CNN and The Guardian. Trump called a “hoax” the warnings from researchers and industry executives that the technology could slip beyond human control and said the criminal and civil justice systems are enough to deal with “bad actors”. He likened the new body to the Space Force created in his first term, said only “High I.Q. individuals” may apply for the czar job, without naming anyone, and gave no details on how the AI Force would work. Trump also said artificial intelligence could reach 25% of US gross domestic product (GDP) and that the United States is “leading China” in the field. The announcement followed a public call by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei for a slowdown in the technology’s development, according to CBS News.
The European Commission proposed on Monday a common rating scheme for data centres, to make their energy and water consumption transparent and to integrate them into Europe’s electricity system. The label, set out in a delegated regulation, will cover data centres with a capacity above 500 kW and also their contribution to the grid, such as the reuse of waste heat and consumption flexibility; according to the Commission, reusing around half of all waste heat from European data centres is equivalent to the heating demand of 4 million households. Brussels wants to triple the European Union’s data centre capacity within five to seven years to sustain artificial intelligence development and cut reliance on US Big Tech, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that these facilities consumed around 68 TWh of European electricity in 2024, a volume expected to virtually double to 114 TWh by 2030, more than 3% of the bloc’s electricity demand. The delegated regulation now faces a two-month scrutiny period by the European Parliament and the Council before entering into force; the first sustainability labels are expected in 2027, and the consultation on minimum energy performance standards closes on 14 December 2026. Reuters notes that the scheme imposes no consumption limits and does not require operators to disclose total power use.
The US Virtual Embassy in Iran issued a security alert telling Americans not to travel to the country “for any reason” and those already there to leave immediately, citing possible flight cancellations, airspace closures and changing land border rules, according to Fox News and the ANI news agency. The notice recalls that Washington has no embassy or consular presence in Iran, with Switzerland acting as protecting power for US interests, and advises citizens to plan alternative means of communication. On Saturday, the State Department had already told Americans in the Middle East to exercise heightened vigilance and prepare for travel disruption, after new Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia. The alert repeats guidance issued several times this year and comes on the eve of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, with an Iranian proposal to end the war still unanswered by Washington and the US blockade of Iranian ports in place.
The United Nations (UN) special rapporteur on human rights while countering terrorism, Ben Saul, concluded that US airstrikes on vessels accused of drug trafficking in the Caribbean and the Pacific breach international law and may amount to crimes against humanity, according to the BBC. The briefing note released on Monday by the UN Human Rights Council says that since 2 September last year there have been at least 68 US strikes outside US territorial waters, killing more than 220 people, and concludes that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the reported 68 attacks that killed 223 people constituted crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law”. Saul argues that the targets, even when identified as members of groups the United States has designated as terrorist, had not staged an armed attack on the country that would trigger a right to self-defence, and that drug trafficking is a law-enforcement matter. US Southern Command (Southcom) said two days earlier that it had killed four people in a strike on a vessel in the Caribbean and claimed the operation killed four “narco-terrorists”; the US government has not offered definitive evidence that the vessels hit were carrying drugs. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says the operation, named Southern Spear, is meant to remove “narco-terrorists” from the hemisphere. On 1 September, UN experts had already called for an end to the strikes and said they may amount to crimes against maritime safety, which would give other countries jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute those responsible.
Ukraine launched more than 1,600 drones at Russia in the early hours of Sunday, about 450 of them towards Moscow, on the last day of Russia’s parliamentary election, according to Russian officials in reports by Reuters and Times Now; Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, called it “the most massive” attack on the capital and said one of the drones shot down on approach hit the Kapotnya refinery, run by Gazprom Neft, as well as a residential building. Russia’s Defense Ministry says it downed 1,100 drones nationwide, including over Crimea and the Black Sea, and Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyov said 249 were brought down over the region and that two people were killed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the operation hit an oil facility and a logistics site; Vnukovo airport suspended all operations and Sheremetyevo imposed “temporary restrictions”.
The commander of the US Coast Guard’s Arctic District, Rear Admiral Bob Little, said in Oslo that Chinese ships sailed in maritime zones off Alaska, passed the Aleutian Islands, entered the Bering Strait and went as far north as the North Pole, according to Reuters; he was speaking at an Arctic security conference and said the United States is “actively responding to competitor activities across an increasingly contested Arctic”. In July, the Coast Guard said it monitored the research vessels Xue Long and Xue Long 2 as they crossed the US exclusive economic zone in the Bering Sea, with the cutter Munro running Operation Frontier Sentinel — the first time this year that Chinese vessels were tracked on that route. The Coast Guard says marine scientific research inside the US exclusive economic zone requires prior US permission.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released video and photographs on Saturday of a visit to the excavation tunnels under Jerusalem’s Old City, beneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, saying he was “very close to the Holy of Holies” and that Israelis “are here, and we will always remain here”; on Thursday, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the compound for Yom Kippur prayers, and on Sunday about 570 settlers passed through the courtyards by 10am local time, according to the Palestinian Jerusalem Governorate. Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt condemned the entries; Jordan’s Foreign Ministry called them “a blatant violation of the existing historical and legal status quo” and said the Islamic Waqf affiliated with Amman is the site’s legal custodian. Hamas called Netanyahu’s tunnel visit “a flagrant assault” on the sanctuary’s identity. Analysts cited by Al Jazeera say the release is driven by the October election, with Netanyahu trailing in the polls.
US and Chinese negotiators ended about eight hours of talks in New York on Sunday without agreement on extending the trade truce that expires on November 10, according to the Financial Times, which cites US sources; the central dispute is the length — Washington proposes six months and Beijing wants the extension to cover the rest of Donald Trump’s term. The paper also says US officials believe China is meeting about two-thirds of its rare-earth supply commitments. In public, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the meeting “very successful”, said the two sides will discuss a channel for artificial intelligence (AI) concerns and that Washington proposed a notification mechanism for incidents; Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the Board of Trade is operational and that teams are still defining a list of non-sensitive goods. China’s Xinhua agency described the talks as “candid, in-depth and constructive”. The meeting sets up Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington on Thursday.
Qatar’s central bank governor, Bandar bin Mohammed bin Saoud Al Thani, told Bloomberg that around 17% of the country’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export revenue has been lost to the regional conflict and that damage to gas infrastructure is “huge,” with two to three years needed for a full recovery, according to TASS. In March, QatarEnergy chief executive Saad al-Kaabi had put at up to five years the repairs to two of the 14 liquefaction trains hit by Iranian attacks (12.8 million tons a year of capacity, equivalent to about $20 billion in annual revenue).
Russia’s Central Election Commission said that, with 95% of ballots counted, United Russia took 57.83% of the party-list vote and is set to win around 355 of the State Duma’s 450 seats, according to The Moscow Times and Meduza. Commission chief Ella Pamfilova said the result surpasses the party’s previous record of 343 seats in 2016 and preserves its constitutional supermajority, which requires 301. Turnout was close to 60%, the highest since 2003, according to Kommersant. The European Union dismissed the vote as “sham elections,” RFE/RL reports, and independent analysts described it as the least competitive in modern Russian history. The commission said final results will be released by Friday at the earliest.
European Union ambassadors failed to reach a deal on Monday to renew sanctions against Russia, which expire at midnight on Tuesday (22), according to AFP and Euractiv. France has joined Slovakia in demanding the removal of billionaire Alisher Usmanov from the list, citing “national security,” while Luxembourg makes the removal of Mikhail Fridman a condition; a diplomat told AFP that the compromise on the table removes both names and extends the rest for up to 36 months. Renewal requires unanimity among the 27, and on 14 September the bloc had already extended the listings by only seven days — a move EUobserver calls unprecedented since 2022. The list covers around 3,000 people and entities. The Financial Times reported that the French request is tied to a possible deal to release French nationals held in Azerbaijan; no government has confirmed the link.
SoftBank launched $10 billion of dollar-denominated notes and €1 billion of euro notes to fund the $10 billion third instalment of its investment in OpenAI, with the transaction expected to close on 1 October, according to Reuters. The issuance replaces the bridge loan the Japanese group had secured for the same purpose.
Călin Georgescu, a former Romanian presidential candidate, was taken in for questioning on Monday by the Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), which carried out five searches in a probe into an organised criminal group and a fraud of more than €1.1 million, according to DIICOT, the Kyiv Post and HotNews. DIICOT has not announced a formal arrest, and Georgescu is already a defendant in another case over an alleged attempt to undermine the constitutional order.
Donald Trump signed on Friday the Russia sanctions law that requires the US president to impose, within 30 days, tariffs of up to 100 percent on goods from the five largest buyers of Russian oil and gas and duties of at least 500 percent on Russian goods, according to Reuters and Fortune. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that Russia “does not threaten any state in Europe” and that the sanctions law does not help revive bilateral relations, according to Sputnik.
Iran’s Statistical Center reported that the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell 10.1 percent between 21 March and 20 June, the first quarter of the Persian calendar, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to AFP and Al Jazeera. Oil and gas extraction fell 26.4 percent, GDP excluding oil dropped 4.6 percent and twelve-month average inflation reached 69.9 percent, according to the official figures.
Britain’s air traffic control provider NATS (National Air Traffic Services) said a technical issue at its Prestwick centre in Scotland is restricting traffic and delaying flights leaving Scottish airports or heading north of the United Kingdom, according to the Associated Press and the BBC; airports south of Manchester are broadly unaffected, the company said. NATS says the problem is unrelated to the software defect of 8 September that led to more than 2,000 flights being cancelled, and the airline easyJet said the fresh failure “once again calls into question the resilience” of the company’s systems.
The UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), the British agency that monitors maritime traffic, reported that an oil tanker was “struck by an unknown projectile” during an inbound transit in the Strait of Hormuz and that two crew members suffered minor injuries, according to Mehr News, citing the agency; UKMTO advised vessels to transit with caution.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed a lawsuit on Monday against Donald Trump’s administration to overturn the ban on the three outlets from the White House, according to CNBC and Variety; the companies are seeking a temporary restraining order to restore their journalists’ credentials, seized on Saturday, according to Reuters and the BBC.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Google €403 million over failures in its processing of location data, following an inquiry opened in 2020 after complaints from European consumer organisations, according to Reuters; the regulator ordered compliance within six months, and the fine is the DPC’s fourth largest since the GDPR came into force, according to TheJournal.ie.
Seven Ethiopian armed groups, including Amhara’s Fano, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), announced on Sunday the formation of the “Alliance for Survival”, aimed at removing Abiy Ahmed’s government and installing a transitional administration, according to the BBC and Al Jazeera; federal authorities have not yet responded.
German auto workers staged nationwide protests on Monday called by the IG Metall union, three days after Volkswagen cut its 2026 operating margin forecast to at most 1%, according to Reuters; the union is pressing the government to lower energy costs and shield domestic production from Chinese imports.
The AfD said on Monday that “the chancellor’s twilight has begun”, after winning state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, claiming the role of Germany’s “new people’s party”, according to AFP and G1; The Guardian reports growing dissatisfaction inside the CDU with Friedrich Merz, who says he is staying on.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said on Monday that in the event of a new US attack it will introduce “new weapons with new capabilities” to the battlefield and hit targets not yet attacked, according to AP; the force says it is prepared for a “prolonged war”. Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said, according to the Tasnim news agency, that Tehran sent Qatar a list of seven conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and Mohsen Rezaei told Al Jazeera they include an end to the war on all fronts, the release of frozen funds and an end to the naval blockade.
An ICE agent shot and wounded Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan who was delivering food for DoorDash, on Sunday afternoon in north Austin, Texas, according to NBC News and The Associated Press. Austin police took part in neither the operation nor the shooting, Chief Lisa Davis said, reporting a wound to the torso and a serious but stable condition; city council member Mike Siegel says the agent rammed his vehicle into the victim’s car before firing at least five times.
The Department of Homeland Security says Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez is under a final order of removal, entered the country under the Biden administration and is in federal custody pending deportation, with the shooting investigated by HSI and the FBI, according to NBC News. Democratic members of Congress demanded an independent investigation and the release of body-camera footage, and at night the Texas Department of Public Safety used tear gas against protesters at the scene, NBC News reports.
The AfD won the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with 38.2% of the vote, ahead of the SPD on 35.5%, while the CDU was shut out of the state parliament with 4.9%, according to NDR and AP — the party’s worst result in any state in its history. The same night in Berlin, the Left won with 25.7% and the CDU-SPD coalition lost its majority, Reuters reports; Alice Weidel said the AfD has “already replaced” the CDU as the “party of the people”, according to AFP.
Russia’s Defence Ministry says its units have taken the settlements of Polnaya and Novoaleksandrovka in the Kharkiv region, according to Sputnik; TASS reports an expert assessment that the North battlegroup advanced 100 sq km in the region over the past week. Both claims are Russian and have no independent confirmation.
A police officer and a man were wounded in an exchange of gunfire near the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Canada, on Sunday evening, as the Jewish community observed Yom Kippur, according to the Associated Press, CNN and The New York Times. The man is in critical condition; police have not said whether the synagogue was the target, and Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has taken the case. Provincial premier Doug Ford said he was “disgusted” by the shooting.
Donald Trump announced he will create an “AI Force” and appoint a federal artificial intelligence tsar, saying his administration “will not in any way hinder or stifle the growth” of the industry, according to the BBC and NBC News. The announcement was made on Saturday and rejects calls to slow AI development until safeguards are in place; what the force will actually do remains undefined.
The agreement on Greenland between the United States, Denmark and Greenland is set to be signed on Tuesday at the UN General Assembly, and Copenhagen says the text puts Arctic security under NATO, according to Reuters. Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen told TV2 that “to a large extent it would be NATO that looks after the Arctic”; the contents of the deal have not been made public and Donald Trump describes it as giving the US “permanent” control over the island’s security.
France and Canada strengthened ties in response to Trump’s provocations, according to Le Monde, and a Canadian minister told the BBC that the UK should “team up” with Canada in a new European alliance.
China confirmed that Xi Jinping will visit the United States between 23 and 25 September for talks with Donald Trump, according to The Hindu, the Hindustan Times and Reuters. Negotiators from both countries are holding the final preparatory rounds, The Hindu reports.
A class action in the Northern District of California accuses OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and SpaceXAI of colluding to slow the advance of artificial intelligence, according to AP. The accusation comes from the plaintiffs and none of the companies responded in the available material.
The North Korean group WaterPlum infected around 30,000 devices across several countries, according to a joint law enforcement advisory cited by BleepingComputer. The notice attributes the campaign to the North Korean government.
The US cybersecurity agency flagged three Linux kernel vulnerabilities as actively exploited, according to Linuxgram. The flag comes from the US government itself and there has been no independent confirmation of who is behind the attacks.
Pakistani police arrested two sisters of former prime minister Imran Khan, according to France24, and his son said relatives and children were “abducted” ahead of the PTI protest march, the Hindustan Times reports.
The United States issued a travel warning and urged its citizens to leave Iran, according to The Hindu, and the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) threatened “significant changes” if the US strikes again, according to Middle East Eye and TASS.
A US police association warns that advances in artificial intelligence are raising the risk of hostile drone use, according to the New York Times. The warning comes from the association and names no author.
Newly unredacted documents in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, made public on Sept. 17, show that Microsoft’s director of applied science, Brent Hecht, called the scraping of news to train language models “the largest theft of labor in human history” in a January 2023 internal memo and said the practice made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use’”, according to TechCrunch and Ars Technica. Microsoft said the comments reflected his individual views, not the company’s position. In the same filings, then ChatGPT head Nick Turley described news publishers as facing an “existential threat”, and a Microsoft document warned of a “doom loop” that would hurt both its models and the wider web.
Israeli forces set up a checkpoint in southern Syria, according to Mehr News, and explosions hit a Syrian army munitions depot near Aleppo, injuring four people, according to the Hindustan Times and Al Jazeera.
The AI coding tool ZCode, from China’s Zhipu, was caught silently uploading users’ full Git history, according to the outlet OSCHINA. The practice was flagged by researchers, and the company did not respond in the available material.
Ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz fell threefold over the weekend, according to Reuters as cited by TASS, and a Reuters analysis describes shuttle transfers keeping oil moving “at a high cost”. The Hindustan Times reports a shortage of tankers pushing fuel prices up.
Europe has injected 45 billion cubic metres of gas into storage for the winter and is rushing to build up stocks, according to TASS.
Huawei presented in this cycle HarmonyOS 7 reorganised around agents, the Atlas 960E supercomputer with optical interconnect and a map of “agentic” computing running from supernodes to clusters, according to OSCHINA and TudoCelular.
North Korea said new sanctions cannot block its development, according to KCNA as cited by Reuters.
A Reuters analysis warned that the oil shock raises the risk of a metals shock, as accelerating electric vehicle sales push demand for raw materials.
The United States and China are discussing an AI safety plan ahead of the summit, according to the BBC and AP. The agenda combines guardrails for the technology’s development with the dispute over access to chips.
Iran’s military command says the United States is preparing to resume strikes on the country, according to Al Jazeera; the accusation comes from Tehran and has not been confirmed by Washington.
The United States has deported around 25,000 people to third countries under secretive deals, according to AFP, The Guardian, France24 and the Washington Post, which published a joint investigation. The Guardian describes people sent to countries they have no link to.
United Russia leads the State Duma count with 57.85% of the vote as 87.91% of ballots were processed, according to Sputnik; TASS put the share of processed ballots at 90.43%. The vote was marked by cyberattacks and drones, The Hindu reports.
Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian paid tribute to the students killed in the Minab bombing, according to Mehr News, and Tehran accused France of “crocodile tears” for pressing Iran on freedoms while staying silent on the school attack, the Hindustan Times reports. Both outlets reproduce the Iranian position.
Three South Korean military officers were injured in an explosion in the Demilitarised Zone, according to the country’s military, cited by Reuters, AP and The Hindu; none of the sources has attributed the incident to North Korea so far.
Taiwan broke ground on an advanced semiconductor packaging park anchored by TSMC, according to Reuters.
US and Chinese negotiators are holding the final preparatory rounds ahead of the Donald Trump–Xi Jinping summit, according to The Hindu, which also reports a US proposal for an ‘AI dialogue’. The New York Times flags arms sales to Taiwan as the issue that could unravel the deal.
Pakistan struck what it calls militant hideouts in Afghanistan and says it killed 28 people; Kabul says the strikes killed three, according to AP, Hindustan Times and Mehr News. There has been no independent confirmation of the death toll.
Beijing links Xi Jinping 24 September visit to Washington to a freeze on new arms sales to Taiwan, according to Kyodo; no Chinese official confirmed the linkage.
France: the government reports 11% of filling stations missing at least one product category (petrol or diesel), with diesel at EUR 2.402/l on 19 September, above April record, a sixth straight week of increases.
Germany approves a EUR 2.5bn package: a 17-cent-per-litre tax cut on petrol and diesel from 1 October, with the price cap only expected in January 2027, days before state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) says it downed another US MQ-1 drone over the Strait of Hormuz, according to Mehr News and Middle East Eye; the claim comes from the IRGC itself and has no independent confirmation.
Israeli strikes hit the Nabatieh area in Lebanon, including an ambulance team, according to Middle East Eye, and towns around Tyre, according to Mehr News. Both outlets attribute the strikes to Israel.
Gaza authorities announced a plan to demolish 255 war-damaged buildings, according to Middle East Eye, as the school year restarts in damaged schools, reported by G1 and Al Jazeera. Gaza’s health ministry, cited by Mehr News, puts the cumulative death toll since the war began at 73,913 — a figure from the local authority, with no independent verification.
The yuan hit a fresh multi-year peak after China’s central bank eased restrictions, on the eve of the summit with Washington, according to Reuters.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called his party’s state election result a ‘disaster’ but said he is staying in office, according to the BBC. The far right (AfD) topped another state vote, the Times of India reports, and in Berlin the left won pledging to nationalise housing, according to Reuters.
20 Sep