Politics
At least 12 people were killed, including two children, and 2,800 injured when thousands of pagers used by members of Hizbullah, an Iranian-backed militia, exploded in Lebanon and Syria. The next day walkie-talkies blew up across Lebanon, killing another 20 people and injuring 450. Israel is assumed to be behind the attacks. It is thought that Israeli agents planted explosive substances inside the devices before they were imported into Lebanon. Israel had just expanded its war aims to include the safe return of 60,000 evacuees, displaced by Hizbullah rockets, to the country's north.
A 2,000km punch
A missile fired by the Houthis in Yemen struck central Israel for the first time. Going by shrapnel from the blast, it seems that Israel’s air-defence systems failed to destroy the missile before it entered the country’s airspace.
A terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for attacks in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Militants stormed a military-police school and an air base where aircraft and mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a Russian network, were present.
Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Senegal’s president, dissolved parliament. The anti-corruption crusader wants a fresh slate of MPs to carry out reforms, such as renegotiating oil and gas contracts with foreign firms. The dissolution worried investors and sent Senegal’s bond yields jumping, but Mr Faye's party is expected to win an election in November.
South Sudan postponed until 2026 elections that were due to take place in December, adding to a growing sense of crisis in the country. Since it took office after independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan’s government has repeatedly avoided going to the polls.
Arvind Kejriwal stepped down as chief minister of Delhi’s regional government, after India’s Supreme Court freed him on bail from six months detention in an alleged corruption case. Mr Kejriwal says the allegations against him are politically motivated and he wants a clean mandate from voters in a forthcoming election. Mr Kejriwal is from the Aam Aadmi Party and is a fierce critic of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads India’s federal government.
The initial stage of voting began in the first regional election in Jammu & Kashmir for a decade. The results are expected on October 8th.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that at least 5,350 civilians had been killed by Myanmar’s army since the coup that brought the junta to power in 2021, and that 2,414 of those had been killed between April 2023 and June 2024 alone. Adding to the country’s misery, at least 260 people have died in floods and landslides in the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi. In Vietnam the death toll from the storm rose to almost 300.
Joe Biden and Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, held talks at the White House aimed at finding a way of allowing Ukraine to use Western missiles against targets inside Russia. The talks were inconclusive. Vladimir Putin said recently that permitting Ukraine to fire the weapons at Russia would be a direct act of war. In an attempt to increase pressure on Britain, Russia expelled six British diplomats shortly before the White House meeting.
Meanwhile, Ukraine expanded its drone attacks inside Russia. People were evacuated from the town of Toropets, which lies 470km (292 miles) north of the border with Ukraine, after a weapons warehouse targeted in the attacks exploded. Russia continued to bombard Ukrainian cities.
Mr Putin issued a decree to increase the number of active troops in Russia’s armed forces by 180,000 to 1.5m. If the order is fulfilled, Russia would have the second-biggest contingent of regular combat forces in the world, behind China and ahead of America and India.
Georgia’s parliament approved a law curtailing the few rights gay people have in the country. If enforced it will outlaw Pride marches, ban the rainbow flag and censor films and books with a gay theme.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, unveiled her new commissioners. The biggest surprise was the resignation of Thierry Breton, a French heavyweight who was in charge of the internal market. He had fallen out with Mrs von der Leyen and she reportedly said she could no longer work with him. Teresa Ribera, an environmental minister in Spain, is the new competition commissioner. She will replace Margrethe Vestager, who imposed huge fines on American tech firms.
America’s Secret Service came under pressure again, after a gunman hid undetected for 12 hours on Donald Trump’s golf course in Florida. Agents saw the man and fired shots at him, with Mr Trump on the course about 350 metres away. The FBI said it was an attempted assassination, the second in two months to target the Republican. The suspect, who is reportedly a fervent supporter of Ukraine and tried to recruit Afghans to help its fight against Russia, was arrested.
The Teamsters union will not endorse either Kamala Harris or Mr Trump in the election, the first time it has not supported a presidential candidate since 1996. The decision is a particular blow to Ms Harris, as the union will now not join voter-mobilisation efforts in the crucial Midwest states.
Faced with a demographic crisis and looming pension shortfalls, China said it would raise its strikingly low retirement ages for men and women for the first time since the 1950s. Starting next year, the pensionable age for most workers will begin to move closer to rich-world norms.
Canada’s ruling Liberal Party lost another by-election in what had hitherto been a safe seat, this time in Montreal. The defeat adds to the pressure on Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, to call an early federal election before the next one is due in October 2025.
The widely accepted winner of Venezuela’s presidential election in July, Edmundo González, said he had been forced to sign a letter accepting that Nicolás Maduro had been re-elected to power. Mr González, who has fled to Spain, said senior members of the Maduro regime had used “coercion, blackmail and pressure” to get him to sign the document while he was in the Spanish embassy in Caracas.
In Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president, signed into law a constitutional amendment that will see judges elected instead of appointed. The overhaul has been roundly condemned as a blow to democracy by business groups, academics and NGOs. But Mr López Obrador is committed to pushing through a raft of reforms in his last month in power.
Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, presented a proposal to amend the constitution to once again allow foreign military bases in the country. For years Ecuador has been wracked by clashes between drug gangs and Mr Noboa wants international help. The United States operated a military base to combat drug-trafficking in Ecuador until 2009, when it was asked to leave.
He knows his audience
In an unusual gesture Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, presented the government’s budget to Congress himself. In a televised set-piece speech he railed against the profligate “miserable rats” in the opposition and repeatedly said there would be “zero deficit”. Any legislation which threatens that would be vetoed, he promised. Markets cheered the speech, sending one measure of the risk of default to its lowest level in three months.