September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Kushner and Witkoff meet Zelenskyy in Kyiv after their Moscow talks
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff arrived in Kyiv and met Volodymyr Zelenskyy a day after three hours of talks with Vladimir Putin. A three-day pledge by Moscow and Kyiv to avoid strikes on each other's capitals opened space for the trip. Washington and Moscow said next steps were discussed, but the unpublished 20-point plan still has no common ground on key issues, especially control of eastern territory.
Kyiv talks end with Zelenskyy leaving the territorial deadlock to leaders
Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner said they left Kyiv encouraged after talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president repeated that unresolved questions such as territorial control can be settled only by leaders, not envoys. British, French and German national security advisers joined the second round, held a day after the pair's three-hour meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Lebanon raises the toll from Israeli strikes to four dead and 32 wounded
Lebanon’s health ministry said Friday’s Israeli strikes across several southern and eastern locations killed four people and wounded 32. The initial account had reported three deaths and 15 wounded in Ramadiyah. Israel’s military said it targeted Hezbollah weapons stores and infrastructure; neither those target descriptions nor the casualty figures have been independently verified. Hezbollah condemned the strikes in its first statement for weeks. AFP spoke in Mayfadoun with a relative of Maryam Salameh.
Leipzig drone accusation sharpens the rhetoric between NATO and Moscow
US ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker described the attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport as a deliberate hybrid act and urged allies to respond firmly. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called accusations linking Moscow to the incident the start of a real war. Germany blames Russia for the August attempt, while Moscow denies involvement.
Lowell’s turn keeps Kauai outside the core track but inside the wind and rain risk
Lowell is turning west-northwest, with its centre forecast to pass west of Hawaii’s main islands Monday night. Tropical-storm-force winds extend about 260 kilometres from the centre, however, and may reach Kauai late Monday. Forecast rainfall on Kauai and Hawaii island is 76–152 millimetres, with local totals potentially exceeding 254 millimetres.
Museum specimens show Pristimantis milpe spent a century under the wrong name
A recheck of 19th-century type specimens in London found that a common frog in Ecuador and Colombia had been classified under the wrong name for more than a century. Pristimantis subsigillatus became a synonym once the old specimens were reassigned, while the living populations were described as Pristimantis milpe. The peer-reviewed ZooKeys study places the newly named species across more than 67,000 square kilometres in the two countries.
Ocaña imposes overnight curfew after drone attack on army base
Ocaña imposed an overnight curfew after Friday night’s attack on the El Trapiche military compound. The municipality aimed to reduce risks to residents and facilitate security work. The curfew ran from ten on Friday night to four on Saturday morning. Norte de Santander authorities offered up to 100 million pesos for information leading to the arrest of those responsible.
OPEC+ holds output as Europe turns to an India diesel route
Seven OPEC+ countries kept their required October production at September's level. In physical fuel flows, India now supplies 60 per cent of the diesel crossing Bab el-Mandeb toward Europe. Vortexa data show Russia's seaborne diesel and gasoil exports fell sharply in August, leaving Indian cargoes as one of the main sources filling Europe's gap.
PACMAN stops a DIII-D plasma instability with 200 milliseconds to spare
Princeton's PACMAN framework predicted a tearing mode on the DIII-D tokamak about 200 milliseconds ahead and prevented the instability by changing the plasma settings. Running in cycles of about 20 milliseconds, it handled tasks involving heating, density and plasma waves across five experiments on the same machine. The peer-reviewed results appeared in Nuclear Fusion; transfer to other tokamaks has not yet been demonstrated.
Putin announces first oil flow at Vostok Oil
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that the first oil had flowed through Rosneft’s new Vostok Oil pipeline to the Bukhta Sever terminal for tanker loading. The project links fields in the Krasnoyarsk region to the Arctic port, whose annual handling capacity Putin put at 30 million tonnes. He said the crude would head toward Asia-Pacific or Europe. The launch followed his order that week to make the Arctic route navigable year-round by 2036.