Latest news for 15 September 2026

IRAN

Street fight in Baluchistan.

IRGC troops traded fire with a new Popular Fighters Front outfit for nine hours (!) near the Pakistani border earlier in the week, leaving several dead on both sides. (The Telegraph)

Comment: This is not Tehran falling over, so much as its long-running Baluch separatist file — Sunni, poor, armed — flaring up while the regime is busy surviving the bigger war. Still, Iran’s foes will hunt for any cracks, and there are few better than a failure to pacify your own ethnic periphery.

UNITED KINGDOM

Celtic summit.

The largest parties of Scotland (SNP), Wales (Plaid Cymru), and Northern Ireland (Sinn Féin) have signed off on a Cardiff memo declaring “Westminster’s time is coming to an end”, and “the future of our nations belongs in the European Union.” 🔥 (Politico)

Comment: No dates, no Wexit referendum machinery, and no sense that Brussels is now queuing up to inherit three messy accessions. But it’s the first time all three devolved first ministers come from independence-leaning parties, presenting an opportunity to wring out more fiscal and regulatory concessions from Westminster as much as spike any pressure for London to somehow re-join the EU. For now, Prime Minister Burnham is insisting he’d rather focus on the cost-of-living “than engaging in constitutional debates or further referendums.”

FRANCE

Oligarch for hostages.

France is now blocking a clean rollover of the EU’s Russia sanctions unless Alisher Usmanov — an Uzbek-born, Putin-adjacent metals billionaire — comes off the list. Paris seems to be trading sanctions relief for several French “spies” held in Usmanov-friendly Azerbaijan. (EuroNews)

Comment: It all hints at the effectiveness of hostage diplomacy, the true value of these mysterious French detainees, or at least how easily European consensus can fracture when shared sanctions start getting traded away for undisclosed bilateral deals.

CHILE

Anti-Pinochet protesters arrested.

Thousands have marched on the 53rd anniversary of Pinochet’s 1973 coup, both to honour his dictatorship’s victims, and to protest against conservative President Kast cancelling the commemoration for the first time since democracy’s 1990 return. Police detained hundreds after clashes. Touring flood damage in the south, Kast said “I cannot erase history”. (AFP)

CHINA

Spymaster sounds the cyber alarm.

The head of Beijing’s MSS intelligence agency, Chen Yixin, has used an essay in a Party journal to warn that foreign AI models (he name-drops Claude and GPT) could threaten Party rule. In response, he’s demanding tighter Party control over the industry. (SCMP)

Comment: Yesterday we explored America’s jitters at AI models eating humanity. And now we get Beijing worried about the model eating the Party. It could be a way to draw red lines ahead of the Trump-Xi summit in DC later this month: we’re happy to talk AI safety, but data sovereignty and political security won’t be on the table. It’s also a warning to China’s domestic labs and talent: ultimately, you work for us.

INDONESIA

Maritime tragedy exposes gaps.

With more than 100 people still missing after another passenger ship capsized in the Java Sea, it’s reviving a lingering political debate around the state of infrastructure in this boat-dependent archipelago. (Al Jazeera)

Comment: With an investigation now underway, and the sector’s safety record long in doubt, this risks morphing beyond another bad weather story into a bigger mix of state capacity and misallocated priorities.

NIGERIA

It’s time.

Africa’s most anticipated IPO is finally here, with local oil giant Dangote hoping to raise as much as $2.1B with the sale of a ~3% stake. Interest has already overwhelmed two popular Nigerian investment platforms. (Punch)

Comment: We wrote about why this record-breaking IPO is such a big deal for Nigeria, Africa and the world here.