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Ukraine war briefing: North Korea sending 50,000 troops to Russia – Zelenskyy

Up to 50,000 North Korean soldiers will be deployed in Russia, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, while calling on South Korea to provide support for Ukraine’s air defence. It is an increase from the estimated 30,000 announced by the Ukrainian president in July. Kyiv had found some North Korean missiles in Ukraine’s territory, he said. “It is absolutely clear that ⁠North Korea will continue to build its experience in modern warfare, receive licences from Russia, and receive all kinds of military tools from them.” This month, an official at Ukraine’s military intelligence told Reuters that a North Korean missile unit has begun deploying personnel and equipment to western Russia and the unit could be equipped with 120 ballistic ⁠missiles and six launchers for strikes against Ukraine. North Korea sent an estimated 14,000 soldiers to Russia’s Kursk region in 2024, helping Moscow fight an invasion by Ukrainian forces. Thousands have been wounded or killed. North Korea has supplied Russia with millions ‌of artillery and mortar rounds – sometimes of dangerously low quality, according to Russian milbloggers and troops – as well as ballistic missiles, long-range artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, according to Ukrainian and independent assessments. Zelenskyy continued that Ukraine “would very much like to receive support from South Korea in ‌an area where we have a shortage”, referring to air defence systems. “We are ready to work on the drone deal and other areas as well,” he said, adding that Ukrainian diplomats “are in contact” with Seoul to push potential deals. Ukraine is very short of high-end air defences and Russia has tried to exploit this by using more ballistic missiles, which are very hard to shoot down without interceptors like the US-owned Patriot. Seventy Atacms short-range ballistic missiles are part of a weapons package that Ukraine is poised to buy from Turkey, according to US congressional documents (pdf). The US would have to approve the resale of the American-origin weapons. The state department indicated to Congress it is prepared to give permission. Along with the M39 Atacms missiles, Turkey also plans to sell Kyiv 47,000 artillery rounds, 12 M270 multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS) and more than 2,000 cluster bombs, according to the notice from the US state department. Russian missiles struck a high-rise apartment block in the Saltivskyi district of Kharkiv, killing two people and injuring 13, said regional head Oleh Syniehubov. Zelenskyy said eight people were wounded in Odesa, where strikes damaged the power grid, the port and residential buildings. He condemned an “absolutely brutal” strike targeting energy infrastructure near a shopping centre in Pavlohrad, Dnipropetrovsk region, that wounded nine people including four children. Russia said Ukrainian drones killed five people and injured two dozen others in the Belgorod region. Zelenskyy, in his evening address on Sunday, defended Ukraine’s replies to Russia’s attacks – including strikes on Russian oil refineries, air defence systems and radar stations – as “truly just responses”. “The Russian war will be increasingly felt at home, in Russia,” he said. The World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said a WHO warehouse stocking medical supplies in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro was destroyed in strikes on Friday. “I cannot say loudly enough: attacks on health care must stop. Otherwise, people are deprived of lifesaving healthcare,” Tedros posted. “Even wars have rules. One of those is that health must be protected!” Ukrainian drone strikes damaged commercial sites and a home in the Russian city of Novorossiysk, said the mayor, Andrey Kravchenko. A major fuel terminal is located at Novorossiysk that links Kazakhstan’s oilfields to markets around the world. It has previously been a target for Ukrainian strikes. Bulgaria summoned Ukraine’s ambassador after a drone entered Bulgarian airspace, the country’s public broadcaster BNT reported on Sunday. The drone exploded on Saturday close to an international gas pipeline shortly after crossing the border from Romania, the Bulgarians said. No casualties or damage were reported. Bulgaria’s defence ministry said the incident was likely accidental and involved a drone that appeared to be a Ukrainian type. Kyiv’s foreign ministry said Ukraine did not deliberately target Bulgaria and the two sides were in “close contact” about it. A “powerful explosion” believed to be from a combat drone was reported in the village of Crocmaz, in south-east Moldova near the border with Ukraine, local police said on Sunday. No one was injured by the impact, which caused a vegetation fire in the Stefan Voda district, police said, adding that “fragments of a combat drone were found at the scene” and would be examined by specialists. Police did not specify the origin of the drone. The UK defence secretary, Wes Streeting, has urged allies to boost Ukraine’s air defences ahead of a winter that Vladimir Putin will seek to use as a “weapon” against Kyiv. Writing in the Sunday Times, Streeting warned that while Putin was currently losing the war, “Ukrainians know what winter brings, and how it can change the picture”. Allies’ efforts to assist Ukraine “must include greater resources for air defence”. “My task – alongside my German counterpart Boris Pistorius, with whom I co-chair the Ukraine defence contact group – is to turn the goodwill of some 50 nations into concrete help.” Pope Leo on Sunday said innocent people were being ⁠killed and wounded in Ukraine and Russia, and called for an end to ⁠the conflict. “Tragic incidents ⁠are multiplying, causing an ever-growing number of civilian victims, including children,” the pontiff said before worshippers ⁠gathered for Sunday’s Angelus prayer. “I renew my heartfelt appeal for international humanitarian law to be ⁠respected and for attacks against civilian targets to cease on both sides.” More than ‌16,000 civilians have been killed, according to the UN, the overwhelming majority of them Ukrainian.

Netanyahu rejects US-led 15-point Gaza peace plan in rare public break with Trump

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has rejected a US-backed 15-point peace plan for Gaza in a rare public break with Donald Trump. In a statement on Sunday, Netanyahu said that he was confronting a “wave of rumours about Israeli weakness and Israeli withdrawals on all fronts” and rebuked US pressure to end wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran without Israel’s buy-in. On Gaza, he said: “Israel does not accept the 15-point document. The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed. And when I say the disarming of Hamas, it means heavy weaponry, lighter weaponry, all weaponry. And we are talking about genuine disarmament, not fictitious disarmament. Right now, we are talking with the Americans about this issue.” Trump’s Board of Peace in July proposed the 15-point plan, which mandated that Hamas disarm in exchange for providing a full Israeli military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and an eventual transition of power to an independent Palestinian National Committee. Trump had said that the agreement would be implemented in stages, but Netanyahu on Sunday said that he wanted a full disarmament first in order to implement the deal. The Israeli leader’s main target in his remarks was the US. Israel has emerged as a key stumbling block in the Trump White House’s plans to broker peace in the region, in Israel’s conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon as well as in the war begun by joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran. And Netanyahu, who is facing tough elections in October and pressure from hardliners in his own government, appears ready to test his relationship with Trump in public in order to shore up his reputation as a defender of Israel at home. Israel had already signalled that it would reject the US-led plan. Soon after Trump announced it last month, Israel stepped up its bombing campaign in the Palestinian territory – strikes killed 18 people last Sunday. Netanyahu’s office had previously indicated it would not back the plan, saying: “The version that has been made public does not reflect Israel’s positions.” But Sunday’s rejection was far more forceful and direct, and appeared targeted at the Trump White House, as Trump and Netanyahu both face difficult elections. “Unlike all those who lecture us, we do what needs to be done for Israel’s security, and we can and know how to stand our ground, even against our best friends when necessary,” Netanyahu said. The head of Trump’s Board of Peace hit back on Sunday, saying the plan remained the “only way forward”. Nickolay Mladenov, the board’s high representative for Gaza, told Israeli television: “The option we are offering today is the only way forward that ensures this tragedy does not happen again.” Netanyahu’s rejection is a blow to Trump’s desire to be seen as a broker of peace in foreign conflicts. With US midterm elections due in November, the White House is desperate to negotiate a peace in Iran in order to reopen the strait of Hormuz and help bring down oil and petrol prices. But the conflicts in the Middle East are interconnected and parallel US efforts have continued to bring peace to Lebanon, where Israel has occupied land in what it says is a buffer zone against Hezbollah, and Gaza, where Gulf allies of the US have decried what they say is an ethnic cleansing campaign being carried out by Israel. Like US presidents before him, Trump has found that Netanyahu can be a difficult ally. Bill Clinton, after meeting Netanyahu for the first time in 1996, is reported to have said: “Who’s the fucking superpower here?” More recently, the Biden administration found that its concerns about the human toll in Gaza were ignored, but continued to publicly back Netanyahu and did not significantly suspend military aid to the country for fear of the political blowback that Netanyahu and his allies in the US could cause. In Trump, however, Netanyahu has found a far more unorthodox and unpredictable counterpart in the White House. Netanyahu is a natural ally for Trump, and he has attacked Democrats before the midterm elections for being weak on supporting Israel. Yet more broadly, support for Israel and its war in Gaza is eroding in the Democratic party, and the Republicans have a presidential frontrunner for 2028 in the vice-president, JD Vance, who is publicly sceptical of Israel and the war in Gaza. Trump will have to decide whether to increase pressure on Netanyahu, potentially alienating some pro-Israel allies, or to allow his efforts for a Gaza peace plan to stall, perhaps indefinitely. The answer will depend heavily on the US president’s own political instincts – are US voters hoping to see Trump emerge as a statesman capable of ending one of the world’s bloodiest recent wars in Gaza, or would a public clash with Netanyahu provoke a revolt among his base? With both countries entering tumultuous election cycles and a generational shift in support for Israel among US voters, the result could redraw the alliance between Israel and the US.

Netanyahu rejects Trump’s Gaza plan and vows no withdrawal until Hamas disarms – as it happened

We’re wrapping our live coverage of the Middle East crisis for today. Here are Sunday’s top developments: Israel has rebuffed Donald Trump’s Gaza plan. The country said it would not leave Gaza unless Hamas was “genuinely” disarmed. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that they were discussing their concerns with the US. “They have ideas; some of them are acceptable to us and some are not, and we know how to stand our ground on these matters,” Netanyahu said. Donald Trump said he’s “low keying it” with Iran as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Trump’s comments to Axios came after Iran said it would not agree to a deal until the US met its demands, which included never speaking insulting the country. “We are only semi-negotiating with them,” Trump also told Axios. Although Donald Trump has rebuffed claims that the US is running low on weapons crucial to its war on Iran, a leaked memo indicates that his military leadership is concerned by falling stockpiles. Per the Washington Post, deputy US defense secretary Steve Feinberg on Wednesday told defense industry leaders that they must “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.” Meanwhile, Trump’s war on Iran continues to draw prominent criticism in the US. New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Trump’s complaints about rising costs clash with his policies that has made daily life more expensive. “Donald Trump may be saying that oil companies are making too much money, but what Donald Trump is doing is starting a reckless war in Iran, having closed door meetings with oil companies before his election, saying, you know, you give me money, you give me campaign contributions, and I will do whatever you want,” Ocasio-Cortez said on ABC.

Canadian government steps in as ‘out of control’ wildfires force thousands to flee

Canada’s federal government has announced it will provide urgent assistance to British Columbia after an onslaught of unprecedented fast-moving wildfires forced about 22,000 people to flee their homes in frantic evacuations. A total of 102 wildfires were raging across the province on Sunday, of which nearly half were categorised as “out of control”, according to the BC Wildfire Service. Of those fires, 78 ignited during the past week. The entire community of Summerland, about 30 miles south-west of the city of Kelowna and home to about 12,000 people, was evacuated overnight on Saturday, along with a further 8,000 people around nearby Peachland. About 10,000 others have been told to prepare to evacuate at a moment’s notice. Anette Boulet was among residents who fled Summerland along Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. As she and her family left around 4.30am Saturday, their home was shrouded in smoke. “You couldn’t see barely. It was just dark, and the ridge, the ridge of fire just coming towards you,” said Boulet, who evacuated to a centre in Penticton. “There’s no words to express it, the fear.” In a social media post on Sunday, Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management and community resilience, said she had “approved a request for federal assistance from British Columbia to provide shelter and accommodations for people who have been forced to leave their homes”. “I have tasked federal officials, led by the government operations centre at Public Safety ‌Canada, to work with the province to ensure support reaches those who need it most,” she said. Efforts to battle the Bald Range wildfire have been hampered by the breakneck speed of its spread. The blaze was first detected late on Friday evening, and grew within hours to more than 40 sq miles (100 sq km) – nearly twice the size of the island of Manhattan – as it raced nearly nine miles toward Okanagan Lake. The province’s premier, David Eby, declared a state of emergency late on Saturday, telling reporters that the blaze had been “like a bomb going off.” Cliff Chapman, BC Wildfire Service’s director of provincial operations, said the prolonged hot and dry weather the province has faced this summer had resulted in “explosive” fire conditions never seen before. Lightning caused by thunderstorms forecast this week could make the situation still worse, he said. Residents were shaken awake in the middle of the night to flee their homes. Jennifer Pascoa, who lives in Summerland, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that she had begun to pack when she saw flames licking the nearby mountains. “It happened so quickly. We came home from the beach, we saw the plume of smoke, and then within an hour, the sky was covered in dark, black clouds,” she said. The British Columbia Wildfire Service said 10 standard helicopters and one night-vision helicopter were involved in the response, but had been hindered by thick smoke, turbulence and large fires. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the country’s federal police force, said an 80-year-old woman died while trying to escape the wildfire that forced evacuations in the Okanagan Lake region. Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, said the rapidity of the fires’ spread was indicative of increasingly extreme blazes springing up in Canada and the US. Southern BC and the pacific north-west in the US had had little to no rain in the past six weeks, leaving the regions “bone dry”, he said. “You walk through the forest, it crunches; if you look sideways, you start a fire.” These conditions were being driven by human-caused climate change, he said. “We’re seeing higher intensity fires today than the past … the shorter the timeframe, the more challenging it is.” Before this decade, fire agencies’ policy was that if a blaze was 20km (12 miles) away from a community, there was no cause for immediate concern. The ferocity and speed of these fires meant that such calculations no longer held, said Flannigan, warning that all homes in at-risk regions should have an emergency kit ready to go. “If a fire can run 60km in a day, you should be worried about it,” he said. The Bald Range fire was also an example of how fires could metastasise through the night, he said. Traditional firefighting practices would usually give firefighters a break during nightfall, as the cooler air would slow the burning. “That’s not the case any more. The fire roars through the evening, through the night, and we’re seeing this more and more,” he said. Drought and the sheer power and size of the fires during the day allow them to keep momentum even in the dark. Fire management agencies in BC and Alberta now fight fires after dark using night-vision helicopters. Current conditions indicated that the fire season in BC and the US states of Washington and Oregon could extend into the autumn, Flannigan said. “It looks grim … there’s no rain,” he said, adding that, like California, Canada may begin to have “fire years” instead of a summer fire season. “I’m scared for the coming weeks.” In the US, crews in Washington that for over a week have been fighting three wildfires that began burning in the Spokane area continued clean-up near containment lines. None of the fires were growing, officials said. The fires have damaged or destroyed about 920 structures. Earlier in the week a man was arrested and charged with intentionally setting the biggest of the three Spokane-area blazes.

Alleged crime boss Daniel Kinahan’s return to Ireland ends global game of cat-and-mouse

A decade after escaping assassination and fleeing into exile, Daniel Kinahan is back in Ireland – but it is not the homecoming he wanted. The alleged leader of the Kinahan organised crime group was extradited from Dubai in an Irish government jet on Sunday and met by a huge security operation in Dublin, marking the end of a global game of cat and mouse with European, US and Gulf authorities. The 49-year-old landed at Casement aerodrome in Dublin on Sunday evening and was taken to the criminal courts of justice in central Dublin to be charged with directing organised crime. A judge told Kinahan that, because of the charge, an application for bail would have to be made to the high court. Kinahan said: “I understand. I think we know I won’t be getting bail, but thank you.” He was then taken 50 miles outside the city to his new home in Portlaoise prison. Tabloid headlines anticipated his return with glee. “Du-Bye!” said one. “Dan and Dusted,” said another. “Kin Air: He’s Coming Home,” said another. It is a moment long sought by law enforcement agencies that named Kinahan as a leader of a cartel said to control about a third of Europe’s cocaine supply, along with running criminal sidelines in firearms and racketeering. As the founder of the boxing management company MTK Global, the Dubliner was also an influential figure in sports and boasted of friendships with Tyson Fury and other champions. Kinahan has not been tried but is braced for conviction and a long sentence, according to clips of an interview that he gave by phone from Dubai to the podcaster James English. “I think I’ve already got life in prison. And we have to go through the dance now.” The married father of five said he had “not been an angel” but that accusations against him were overblown. “I believe in a way I’m a scapegoat.” He had not laundered money through boxing promotion, he said, rebutting one of the allegations against him. Kinahan said he looked forward to familiar Irish treats such as a crisp sandwich. “Get back home and have a little bit of batch bread and a packet of King crisps or Tayto.” The bravado, or fatalism, could not disguise a dramatic fall. From gilded opulence in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), allegedly at the helm of a criminal empire worth hundreds of millions of euros, Kinahan will reportedly become an inmate at the maximum-security A5 unit within A block at Portlaoise. His father, Christopher Kinahan, launched a family enterprise in the 1980s by importing heroin into Dublin. A polished figure with university degrees and a facility for languages, Kinahan senior, better known as Christy, was convicted of drug offences and money laundering while creating a network that spanned Latin America, north Africa, the UK and continental Europe. In 2009, a US diplomatic cable named his son Daniel as “an Irish businessman involved in narco-trafficking throughout Europe”. Soon after, Spanish authorities arrested Christy and Daniel and seized assets, but the Kinahans emerged largely unscathed. That changed when a murderous feud with the rival Hutch gang piled up corpses and led to an audacious but unsuccessful attempt on Daniel’s life at a boxing weigh-in at Dublin’s Regency hotel in February 2016. The death of one man, David Byrne, fuelled further killings. Kinahan was never again seen in public in Ireland and operated from southern Spain before settling in Dubai in the UAE, which had no extradition agreement with Ireland. With his father and brother Christopher junior, Daniel remained alert to surveillance attempts but lived openly and turned MTK Global into a boxing powerhouse. That apparent untouchability evaporated in 2022 when the US offered a reward of up to $15m for information that led to the arrest or conviction of the trio. Washington had been reluctant to get involved until lobbied by the then assistant garda commissioner John O’Driscoll, Greg Gatjanis, who ran the US national security council’s strategy for transnational organised crime, told the MacGill summer school last month. “To this day I hold Ireland, the gardaí, as the model [for international manhunts] of how they handled the Kinahan organisation,” said Gatjanis. “Their drug empire probably did not touch the US, but then he started talking about the effects of the Kinahan organisation and the terror they were inflicting. I went from telling him I couldn’t accommodate sanctions because I could not make a case for it to agreeing to starting up an investigation, and that began the entire sanction investigation.” In May 2025 Ireland agreed an extradition treaty with the UAE and the net began to close. Sean McGovern, a cartel lieutenant wanted for murder and directing organised crime, was extradited that month and jailed for 24 years. Daniel Kinahan was arrested in April this year. UAE authorities rejected his appeal last month, clearing the way for extradition. Irish military personnel are expected to reinforce police during Kinahan’s transfers to court and prison. Kinahan told the podcast he would be subject to a “circus” and “character assassination”. Gatjanis said no organised crime group lasted for ever. “It’s born, it crawls, walks, runs, starts to decline, ultimately dies.”

‘I was on my honeymoon!’: Hamish Falconer’s surprise call-up to Burnham’s cabinet

When Hamish Falconer left his career as a Foreign Office diplomat for the hostile environment of a Labour party selection process, one of his last acts was a negotiation to free six hostages from the Taliban. When he won the key marginal seat of Lincoln in the 2024 general election, he did not expect to be back in those offices on King Charles Street quite so quickly – he was appointed Middle East minister just two weeks later. Two years on, he is one among the first three of his generation of MPs to reach the cabinet, and he is back around the negotiating table, this time with the EU. One of his oldest friends, Anneliese Midgley, is another of the three MPs from the 2024 intake to reach the cabinet, as Andy Burnham’s chief whip. Falconer had trusted Midgley – a close confidant of Burnham – to keep him in the loop about cabinet moves. But the tight secrecy of Burnham’s first appointment meant that he was caught off guard by his promotion, while on his honeymoon in Greece. “We got married in June but delayed the honeymoon until recess, and thought: what could possibly go wrong?” he said. “I thought it would be fine; Midge hasn’t told me not to go. Within 24 hours, I got a call saying: ‘Sorry, you have to look at flights.’ I was like: ‘I’m on my honeymoon!’ And the vibe was: you sort of have to be here for your first cabinet meeting. “So a combination of flights managed to get me back and forth, but on the 5am Jet2 flight, I might have been the only person wearing a suit.” He will attend cabinet as minister for European relations, taking the reins of negotiations with the EU for the next joint summit. While he is careful to praise his predecessor, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Falconer said he wanted to up the speed and ambition of deepening ties with the EU. “This is right at the centre of everything this government is trying to do: cost of living, energy,” he said. “Yes, there are some technical questions we need to get right. But the bigger picture is there is a massive wider European agenda. We want to be part of those discussions on security, defence, tech, about where Europe is going.” Falconer is the second generation of his family to attend cabinet – his father, Charlie Falconer, was Tony Blair’s justice secretary. He was long tipped as one of the most ambitious of the new intake of Labour MPs and has spent much of the past two years flying to summits and negotiations on Gaza and Iran. He has answered a record-breaking number of urgent questions in the House of Commons from MPs, on Israel and Gaza, Iran and Sudan and the Chagos Islands. “I found it so strange coming back into the Foreign Office, where apparently I still had stuff I had left there,” he said. “People I knew incredibly well, people I’d had dysentery with in South Sudan, they wouldn’t call me Hamish any more, they would only call me minister. So it was a real head-spin.” When Falconer took on the brief – nine months after the 7 October Hamas massacre and the subsequent Israeli onslaught on Gaza – there was deep suspicion of Labour because of Starmer’s early comments about the right of Israel to cut off energy and water to Gaza. Burnham has since apologised for how disillusioned many voters became with Labour over those comments. “I came in with this knowledge that there had been a lot of upset and concern about what Keir had said … the LBC interview, and so I was determined that we would make a real contribution,” Falconer said. “I feel so proud to be the first Middle East minister who recognised the Palestinian state. I will literally never forget the kids we helped rescue from Gaza, all the students who started their lives here.” But it never felt like enough, Falconer admits. Many in his party wished the government could have gone much further with evacuations, aid and sanctions. “It was a terribly difficult job to do for two years because I would feel that the country was desperate not to see the horrors of Gaza continue … they couldn’t bear – rightly – that there was malnutrition among children, that there was still terrible loss of life,” he said. “There are so many incidents that were burned into my mind. I think over the last two years we did really important and historic things. But nobody could look at the last two years in the Middle East and not feel just such a depth of sadness. And my God, I carried that with me, and will still carry that with me.” Falconer is speaking from his constituency office in Lincoln, yards from the cathedral in a city which is the sole patch of red in a county once solidly Conservative but where Reform have been growing dominant. It is home to the constituency of the Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, and the mayor is the former Conservative MP turned Reform UK defector Andrea Jenkyns. There is a palpable sense of relief from Falconer that Labour has some chance, under Burnham, to get another public hearing. “I can see what the alternative is. I see it every day. I work with a Reform mayor – actually that’s probably overstating how practical a conversation I can have,” he said. “I really know what is at stake because it is right outside my city, and this is such an important battle to get right. “The truth is, the right are not offering any answers for the country. I could have snorted with laughter at some of the proposals that were being made by Reform in recent weeks, which were so obviously unserious.” Burnham’s key weak spot has often been said to be foreign policy – and he has made it known he intends to spend far less time on the world stage than his predecessor, which has worried some officials and international leaders who admired Starmer’s commitment to Ukraine and to diplomacy in the Middle East. Falconer said it was “not fair” to describe the prime minister as uninterested. “I’ve known Andy a long time. He is incredibly engaged,” he said. “He’s someone who is good at forming relationships, and that’s so important in international relations.” But the “Makerfield test” should still be applied to foreign policy, how actions will affect the kinds of voters who delivered Burnham his landslide in his Wigan byelection. “It’s not a hard or complicated test,” Falconer said. “I am really focused on delivering something that my constituents will feel in their day-to-day lives. In my constituency office, I’m sat across from a small gas turbine producer. I want to make it easier for them to trade in Europe, to continue to grow. “I know through my job, I can make that better. That is true of businesses right across the city. That is what I think the Makerfield test, the Lincoln test, is all about.”

Iran-aligned Houthis claim they attacked oil refinery in Saudi Arabia

Yemen’s Tehran-aligned Houthis have claimed responsibility for an attack on a refinery in Saudi Arabia, two days after the kingdom signed ⁠a defence pact with Turkey ⁠and Pakistan in response to growing regional instability caused by the US-Israel war on Iran. The attack early on Sunday came after Iran said tough new demands would have to be met before it would reopen the strait of Hormuz, and after the United Arab Emirates said one of its ships had been targeted by an Iranian missile, as a deal to open the waterway remained out of reach. Iran’s supreme national security council said the strait would not open until the US corrected its “behaviour”. The US must never threaten Iran again and permanently end the war with Tehran and its armed allies in the region, said the statement from the council’s secretary, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). He added that the US must also end the naval blockade of Iranian ports and withdraw its military from the area, “completely compensate” Iran for war damage, lift sanctions and “unconditionally” release frozen assets. There was no immediate comment from the US. According to the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by the US and Iran in June, a timetable to end sanctions and a plan for compensation would be part of a final peace deal, and negotiations would address frozen assets. The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Saturday that Iran and Oman were close to reaching an agreement on navigation through the strait, “specifically the determination of a transit route”. But the waterway’s reopening was contingent on other conditions, Araghchi said, in remarks shared on social media. He blamed the situation on what he called the US violation of the June MoU. Oman, which is mediating and has made relatively few comments on the Hormuz talks, said on Saturday that the discussions were continuing “in a positive and constructive atmosphere”. It condemned attacks on ships in the strait. When it comes to decision-making in Tehran, the final say rests with the supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since an airstrike killed his father and predecessor on the first day of the war. State media said on Sunday that the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, met Khamenei in late July. Pezeshkian has given differing accounts in recent ⁠weeks about his access to the supreme leader, saying in July that interactions with Khamenei were “increasing day by ‌day”, only to note weeks later that communicating with him was “very difficult”. With Iran and the US still arguing over the parameters for peace, the Houthis last month declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea, citing what they said was a Saudi siege on them, an allegation Riyadh denies. The Saudi energy ministry said a fire had broken out at Aramco’s Jazan refinery early on Sunday but was later extinguished with no injuries and authorities were dealing with the ⁠incident, without giving a cause. The Houthis used a drone to target the refinery in south-west Saudi Arabia, Yahya Saree, a military spokesperson for the rebel group, said in a post on X. They had struck Aramco sites before in Jazan, which processes 400,000 barrels of crude oil a day. They had also hit Yanbu, an oil export hub ‌on the Red Sea. In a separate statement, Saree said the Houthis had carried out missile and drone strikes on the Yemeni Red Sea port city of Mocha, which is controlled by the country’s internationally recognised, Saudi-backed governing body in Aden. The UAE said on Saturday that a ship affiliated with its state oil company had been targeted by an Iranian missile. There was no immediate comment from Iran, whose IRGC has previously attacked ships, saying they had not coordinated their passage through the strait with Tehran. Tehran and its allied Shia armed groups have been striking Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and blockading their ‌energy shipments since the US and Israel launched attacks on Iran on 28 February. The escalation of the conflict, which has disrupted global energy supplies and rattled the world’s economy, prompted Saudi Arabia on Friday to form an alliance with US allies Turkey and Pakistan. The accord is intended to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression and stipulates that an armed attack against any of the three would be regarded as ⁠an attack on all. The Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said the alliance was not directed against Iran or any other country, but rather served as a general pledge to support the security of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It was not clear whether or how either Pakistan or Turkey would join in any Saudi response to the latest attacks.