Thursday, September 17, 2026
In her State of the European Union address in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen invited Canada to become the EU's first associate member. The treaties make full membership impossible, because Canada is not a European state. What she is offering is a new category, to be negotiated, with a summit in Montreal next month.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague convicted former president Hashim Thaci of four counts of war crimes on Wednesday and sentenced him to 25 years. Three other former Kosovo Liberation Army commanders were also convicted. The court is Kosovo's own creation, staffed by international judges, sitting in another country, and it exists because Kosovo's allies required it.
Russian drones struck a Warsaw-bound train near the Ukraine-Poland border on Sunday, minutes after a delegation including Boris Johnson and Carl Bildt had passed through the station. A second strike hit near another crossing point, and Poland recovered a suspected Russian drone from the Baltic. NATO's secretary general says the alliance will increase its support for Kyiv.
With nearly all votes counted in Bangsamoro's first parliamentary election, the Bangsamoro Federalist Party leads on 35.2 percent against 32.4 percent for the United Bangsamoro Justice Party, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front's own party. The leader in front is the region's chief minister, himself a former MILF commander. Turnout passed 82 percent. Proclamations are delayed.
Austria revoked the visa of Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, before the IAEA's General Conference opened in Vienna on Monday. The United States objected to a UN sanctions waiver for his travel, and under the committee's rules one objection was enough. Iran says the host country broke its obligations. The conference it cannot attend is the one that debates its nuclear programme.
More than 2.3 million voters in the Muslim-majority Bangsamoro region of the southern Philippines were eligible on Monday to elect the region's first parliament, the step that ends the transition set up by the 2014 peace agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. A shooting near a polling station killed three people the day before. Results are still to come.
Sweden's centre-left opposition leads the preliminary count by 176 seats to 173, with postal and overseas votes still to come. The Social Democrats are the largest party on 28.1 percent. The Sweden Democrats, whom the prime minister had proposed bringing into government, fell to 17.6 percent, the first decline in their history.
The leaders of the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin, who are now the first ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, signed a joint declaration in Cardiff on Monday asserting their nations' right to self-determination. The UK prime minister has already ruled out referendums in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The power to hold one sits with Westminster in every case.
Speaking at his golf resort in Ireland on Sunday, President Trump said the US would ultimately leave Iran "unless we decide to stay and keep the oil like Venezuela," and that gasoline prices would "drop like a rock" when the war ends. The two statements point in opposite directions. One describes a withdrawal. The other describes an occupation of the world's most contested oil infrastructure.
Saudi Arabia shut its East-West pipeline after drone attacks last week, closing the main route its oil had used to avoid the Strait of Hormuz. Over the weekend the Houthis took Perim Island and with it control of the Bab al-Mandab, the strait that cargoes loaded at the pipeline's Red Sea terminal must pass to reach Asia. Brent rose toward $108 on Monday.
US officials have linked satellite imagery supplied to Iran by Chinese entities to the July strike on a base in Jordan that killed three American soldiers, The Wall Street Journal reported. Iran obtained high-resolution pictures of the base before the attack and after it. The officials did not accuse the Chinese government. The disclosure lands ten days before Xi Jinping is due at the White House.
The Philippine Coast Guard recovered 41 more bodies from the MV June Aster on Saturday, raising the toll to 76 with 43 survivors and 13 missing. Those figures add up to 132, which is exactly the number who boarded. The ship was certified for 330. Overloading is no longer the question; the two explosions and the missing captain are.
The New York Times, citing Iranian officials, reports that a hardline group attacked ships in the Strait of Hormuz in early July without the knowledge of the president, the Revolutionary Guards commander or the national security council, wrecking the memorandum meant to end the war. Iranian officials told Washington the same thing in July. Analysts argued then that the chain of command had decided.
Organisers say about 150,000 people marched in some 20 German cities on Saturday demanding a ban on the AfD, six days after it won 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt. Germany's constitutional court has refused a ban before because a party was too insignificant to threaten democracy. The AfD's success removes that obstacle and creates a different one.
The Philippine Coast Guard's Saturday briefing gives the same figures as Friday's: 35 dead, 43 survivors, 53 missing. Burnt remains were found in the economy accommodation. Forensic teams are working under temporary tents at the port in Coron. The count now moves at the speed of identification rather than search.
The MV June Aster was four nautical miles from Coron when survivors say an explosion came from the cargo hold. Thirty-five are confirmed dead, 43 survived and 53 are missing. That is 131 people against a manifest of 134, and in Philippine ferry disasters the manifest has not always been the number aboard.
Britain has banned imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and sanctioned individuals and companies involved in settlement expansion. The goods ban takes six to nine months and covers a small trade flow. The measures on construction, financing, real estate and advertising start sooner and reach further.
Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the war with Iran "is going to end immediately after the election" on 3 November, and that Washington is no longer seeking a negotiated end. When the party most able to stop a war names the week it will stop, everyone else stops planning for an outcome and starts planning for a date.
American forces struck further Iranian tankers, and attacks have been reported on Saudi oil facilities. Brent passed $100. For a year this conflict was fought over a waterway and the vessels crossing it. Hitting production and export infrastructure is a different category of target, and it does not reverse.
Two people were pulled out alive on the tenth day — a worker from 225 metres inside a flooded hydropower tunnel, and a 64-year-old from her collapsed house. Nepal and China now count 1,375 dead and about 5,000 missing. The gap between those figures will close, and almost none of it will close through rescue.
Ursula von der Leyen announced a €200m package in Nuuk on Monday, covering connectivity, clean energy, critical raw materials, mining, tourism, education, fisheries and housing. The same day, eleven NATO countries began exercises in Greenland with about 400 personnel. The two announcements are doing different jobs.
Iran's security council secretary says a restricted maritime zone will be declared within days, running from the US blockade line through Hormuz into the Gulf, with uncoordinated vessels placed on a list affecting their insurance and future passage. American forces have already redirected 87 ships. A master cannot satisfy both.
On Saturday this paper asked whether the 72-hour halt on strikes against Kyiv and Moscow would be extended, and said a return to strikes the moment the aircraft left would mean the pause was hospitality. The talks ended without a breakthrough. Zelensky expects the war to run into winter. The undertaking runs out at the end of Monday.
The AfD took 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday and 39 of 83 seats, three short of a majority. The four parties that have ruled out governing with it hold 39 between them — exactly the same number. The balance is five seats belonging to the one party that has not ruled it out.
Eurometal says 300,000 European manufacturing jobs will go before the end of this year, and marked the claim by carrying ten coffins around the European Commission. The stunt makes the figure easy to discount. The cost gap underneath it does not depend on the stunt being fair.
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday and Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Sunday. To make the two journeys safe, Russia and Ukraine each held off aerial attacks on the other's capital for 72 hours. It was arranged in days, it required no monitors, and it held.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard says it hit three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and three US-affiliated ships, hours after American forces disabled three Iranian tankers. CENTCOM has not confirmed it and no damage has been reported. The notice issued alongside the claim needs no confirmation.
An American carrier and a guided-missile destroyer evaded ballistic missiles fired by the Revolutionary Guard on Saturday. No US personnel were hurt. The response was not aimed at the launchers. US forces struck three Iranian oil tankers — two disabled, one abandoned by its crew and left inoperable.
Six transits a day where there were eighty-five. Meanwhile the day rate for a very large crude carrier has passed $200,000 on the Gulf-to-Asia run, up more than 440 percent in a year, and tanker owners are booking the best earnings since the last supercycle. The same event did both things.
Eleven more ships were added this week to a blacklist now naming 56 vessels — crude carriers, gas tankers, clean product ships. The clause that matters is the last one: any vessel that takes cargo from a listed ship, ship-to-ship, joins the list. That is not area denial. It is a sanctions regime, run from the other side.
US Central Command says it has cleared Iranian sea mines from the transit routes through the Strait of Hormuz. Two monitoring bodies still warn of drifting and uncharted mines outside the swept lanes, and analysts say the greater danger was always the missiles and drones on the shore. Clearing a channel is not the same as opening a strait.
Warships have been escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz for months. War-risk premiums went from one to three percent of hull value before the war to between seven and a half and ten percent, and the escort did not bring them down. Security and risk are priced by different institutions, and they do not net.
The delivery company building Expo 2030 shifted to Saudi-made pipe, cable and concrete and avoided the shortages the war produced. Local content rules were written to build an industrial base. They turned out to be a supply chain hedge nobody had priced.
US officials say COSCO vessels carry concealed signals-intelligence equipment. China calls the claim baseless. Either way, the problem the accusation creates is commercial: the fleet in question calls at the ports that everyone else's cargo moves through.
A head of state posted an AI-generated video of explosions at the world's most important oil export terminal. There was no other evidence of an attack. For anyone pricing oil, the question is no longer whether it happened but what it costs to find out.
China's factory gauge says contraction. Its high-tech sub-index says expansion. A single national figure is now averaging two manufacturing economies that are moving in opposite directions.
A diplomatic gift arrives in an afternoon and needs no mechanism. Undoing one requires a procedure, an owner and somebody accountable for the decision, and the Manila Zoo had none of the three.
When Suez closed, ships went around Africa. It cost more and took longer, and it worked. The Gulf offers no equivalent, which is why traffic through Hormuz has fallen by most of itself rather than moved somewhere else.
Every party to a sea voyage can transfer the risk of a closing chokepoint to somebody else. Owners insure hulls, charterers hedge freight, underwriters lay it off again. The crew is the one link in the chain with no market to sell its exposure into.
Almost every byte that crosses an ocean crosses a cable, and the cables break constantly. The vessels that fix them are a few dozen ageing ships held on shared retainers, and the replacement pipeline is close to empty.
The fastest way to move disaster supplies is also the most expensive per tonne in existence. The alternatives cost a fraction and require somebody to fund idle capacity in advance, which no budget cycle rewards.
Subsidy programmes brought cell manufacturing to the continent on a schedule. The electricity those factories need arrives on a different one, set by transmission queues nobody budgeted political attention for.
A country that built its post-war labour model on not relying on foreign workers now depends on them in the industries that keep it running. The policy has changed less than the practice.
The long-term contracts that financed the world's liquefied natural gas terminals assumed buyers who would take the volume for decades. Those buyers are now asking to be let out, and the terminals still have debt to service.
Freight moves by road across Europe not because the track is missing but because the places to load and unload it are. The investment now going in is unglamorous, terminal-shaped and long overdue.
Commercial interest in northern shipping routes is running well ahead of the capacity to escort, chart and rescue along them. The constraint is a shipyard problem that takes a decade to solve and was deferred for thirty years.
Satellite comparison and video have established what happened above the Nepal-China border. The death toll has risen to at least 469, and the same valley is being watched for a second flood.
At least 389 are dead in Nepal and more than 1,300 missing, among them over 700 foreign nationals from two dozen countries. Chinese authorities warn a landslide-dammed lake could give way.