Iranian authorities revealed on Saturday that three of Tehran’s pilots who went down early in the Middle East war were still being held in Qatar, calling on the Gulf state to release them. Iran had previously reported one pilot killed and others missing after a sortie to Qatar in March, but news of their alleged capture was not publicised at the time. “Three Iranian pilots were captured alive by Qatari forces after their Su-24 fighter jets crashed during the war,” said General Mohammad...

Israeli air strikes on southern Lebanon killed at least 11 people on Saturday, in the deadliest attacks since a truce between Israel and Hezbollah went into effect on June 20. Lebanon’s health ministry and state news agency said an air strike that targeted a home on the edge of Ansar village killed seven people, including three children, and wounded two. The second, on the village of Deir al-Zahrani, killed four and wounded 17. Israel and the Lebanese government announced a “framework agreement”...

Police in Virginia have arrested a 19-year-old in connection with a shooting on Saturday that left five people injured. No one died in the shooting, though one victim sustained critical injuries. Chesterfield county police announced the arrest of Camron Harris of Henrico, Virginia. They found him hiding in a wardrobe on campus on Saturday afternoon. He was not a student at the university, authorities said. Police said they obtained eight felony warrants for his arrest including malicious...

The US is readying unprecedented economic measures against Iran, as President Donald Trump seeks to intensify efforts to force Tehran to capitulate after almost six months of war. The president said in a brief interview with Fox News that the US was planning to hit Iran’s economy hard, and that he did not care if the conflict were to end before the November US midterm elections, which would hinge on voter perceptions of the economy. Trump has struggled to find an off-ramp to the war, which has...

Russia is confounding expectations that its influence in the Middle East would drastically decline after the downfall of Syria’s Assad regime in 2024. At the time, Moscow operated about 100 military facilities in the war-torn country, following its intervention in the Syrian civil conflict from 2015 to prop up then president Bashar al-Assad in alliance with Iran and its regional proxies. When Assad was forced to flee to Moscow, and control of most of Syria was seized by Islamist rebels led by...

Thirty lions and tigers that were kept alive – barely – for years in cramped concrete cages at a closed Argentine zoo began entering jumbo-size transport crates on Friday as they embarked on ambitious journeys to wildlife sanctuaries halfway across the world in South Africa and the United States. The cats are being rescued from the former Lujan Zoo, about 70km (43 miles) northwest of Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires, after years of uncertainty over their fate. Four Paws, the international...

President Donald Trump on Friday said he would “soon” declare the Strait of Hormuz waterway part of US territory after defeating Iran. “After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated – pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States,” he said with a chuckle during a political rally at a police academy in Garden City, New York. “It’s true,” he added. It was unclear how seriously Trump intended the remark or whether it represented a new policy...

UK academic Jason Arday, who resigned from the University of Cambridge last week amid a high-profile plagiarism storm that featured racism claims, was found dead on Friday, the prestigious British institution confirmed. Arday, 41, was found unresponsive on Friday afternoon at an address in south London, according to the capital’s Metropolitan Police Service, which did not confirm the identity of the deceased person discovered. “We are desperately saddened to hear this tragic news,” Cambridge...

President Donald Trump dismissed concerns on Friday over living conditions and the mental health of service members on a US aircraft carrier deployed against Iran, while confirming the ship would soon rotate out. Asked by reporters whether family members were worried about the situation on the USS Abraham Lincoln, Trump said “no, they’re not”. Trump also rejected the idea that the ship – now at sea for nine months – had been deployed for too long. “No, no, no, not nearly enough,” he said. The...

Italian authorities recovered three artworks by Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse worth millions of euros that were stolen earlier this year from a private museum near the northern city of Parma, police said on Friday. A statement from the Italian Carabinieri’s art recovery squad said the artworks were discovered during searches ordered by prosecutors, but no details were given. The investigation is ongoing. Meanwhile, Brazilian police said late on Thursday that they had located eight stolen works by...

Luigi Mangione admitted in court on Friday to fatally shooting US health insurance executive Brian Thompson and pleaded guilty to two federal charges of stalking the executive with the intent to kill him. “I shot Mr Thompson in Manhattan and ‌he died,” Mangione said. The guilty plea will avert a federal trial in the closely watched case over the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, a brazen crime that was condemned by public officials but became emblematic of Americans’ frustration with health...

Li, a woman in her late twenties from southwestern China, is anxious about her coming interview for a 10-year US visa. She has big plans for her travels – a weeks-long stay next year that would be her first visit to the country – followed by a planned return trip in two years while pregnant so her child can attain American citizenship. But those plans have been thrown into doubt. Last week, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to end “birth tourism”, tightening scrutiny on...

A helicopter pilot has died after crashing in a forest in eastern Germany while carrying out liming work, the police directorate in the city of Chemnitz said on Friday. Workers managed to pull the man from the helicopter after the impact, police said. Despite immediate first aid administered at the scene, the man died from his injuries. The helicopter had no other people on board. Police did not provide information on the identity of the pilot or the cause of the accident near the small town of...

A drone entered Latvian airspace and was shot down by Italian Eurofighter jets, the military said on Friday. The decision to shoot it down was taken to avert a threat to Latvia’s population, Defence Minister Raivis Melnis said. An air alert was lifted after the drone was intercepted, Latvia’s military said on social media, after authorities had urged people across the Baltic state to avoid going outside and seek shelter. A spokeswoman for Latvia’s military said the drone was shot down over a...

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage won his self-triggered by-election in southern England on Friday, but saw his strategy to silence critics backfire when his main rival, Count Binface, a comedian dressed as a trash can, took more than a quarter of the vote. In a highly unusual move, Farage, one of Britain’s leading Brexit campaigners, did not turn up at the vote count in the southern English seaside resort of Clacton because, he said, ‌the police had advised him there was a campaign to disrupt the...

The top US priority now in the Iran war is no longer its nuclear programme but to bring petrol prices down for American consumers, the vice-president said on Thursday, with the treasury secretary adding that new economic punishment to wear down Tehran is imminent. The comments by Vice-President J.D. Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent illustrate the powerful leverage Tehran has gained by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon – consistently...

We have selected seven stories from this week’s news across Hong Kong, mainland China, the wider Asia region and beyond that resonated with our readers and shed light on topical issues. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. China completes milestone test of US$10.8 billion canal link to Southeast Asia Chinese authorities have conducted the first full transit test along a 134.2km (83.4-mile) canal megaproject linking a vast inland region with Southeast...

Some sailors have reportedly tried throwing themselves into the sea, basic supplies can run short and sanitation is going awry: life on America’s giant Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier is increasingly difficult as the Iran war drags on. The ship – now in its ninth month of deployment – is expected to be replaced in the Middle East by another carrier, the George Washington, in a move sure to be welcomed by the Lincoln’s crew and their loved ones. But concerns about conditions on the Lincoln have...

In every civilisation, certain stories capture the psyche so profoundly that they are retold across centuries. In the West, Homer’s Odyssey is the one. Countless adaptations have emerged over millennia, inspiring literary giants from Dante Alighieri to James Joyce. Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation is merely the latest. While it reflects the British-American filmmaker’s personal vision, it also offers a glimpse into the anxieties and self-reflections of today’s Western elite. Homer’s...

President Donald Trump ordered the US Navy to return to using steam catapults to launch planes off of aircraft carriers, acting on a long-time complaint despite opposition from many naval officers. In a presidential memorandum, Trump ordered US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth to come up with a plan within 60 days on what would be needed to use hydraulic catapults in the next Gerald Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. The planned USS Doris Miller will be the fourth ship in the six-vessel...

Luigi Mangione is expected to plead guilty on Friday to resolve federal charges relating to the fatal shooting of UnitedHealth Group executive Brian Thompson, and prosecutors will recommend he serve life in prison, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday. The plea would come at a Friday hearing that US District Judge Margaret Garnett set after federal prosecutors and defence lawyers jointly requested one. Court records did not identify the purpose of the hearing, and it is possible...

When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed the Mecca defence agreement, they executed a structural overhaul of the Middle East’s security architecture. The pact codifies a defence commitment, where an armed attack on one is treated as an assault on all. Building upon September’s Saudi-Pakistan defence agreement, this tripartite arrangement bridges the financial capital of the Gulf, the...

⁠Bird remains were found ⁠in the engine of a Ryanair Boeing 737 NG plane where a passenger was partially sucked through a broken window shortly after take-off from Greece in July, the US National Transportation Safety Board said on Thursday. The NTSB ‌is investigating the incident where a piece of the engine broke off the plane and smashed the window. The plane, headed to Germany, lost pressure and was forced to make an emergency landing. The NTSB said in its preliminary report into the July 10...

The Pacific-based aircraft carrier USS George Washington has begun heading towards the Middle East, according to Navy statements and open source information on the ship’s movements. This comes as reports have emerged of mental health and supply issues aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, whose long deployment to the Middle East in support of the Iran war includes a record-setting uninterrupted time at sea of more than 240 days. The USS George Washington left port in Da Nang, Vietnam, last week,...

The Kennedy Centre board voted on Thursday to add US President Donald Trump’s name to the facade of the performing arts venue and move forward with a two-year closure, according to congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a trustee through her position in Congress, and her lawyers. A representative for the Kennedy Centre did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The moves set up a test of US District Judge Christopher Cooper, who ruled in May that letters affixed to the building and spelling out...

A passenger train derailed on Thursday in southern England, seriously injuring two people and causing minor injuries for nine others after three carriages overturned, the British Transport Police said. The Southern Rail train from Victoria station in London to Eastbourne was carrying about 150 people when it went off the tracks outside the tourist town of Lewes. Passenger Rob Bradley said the train began rocking as it picked up speed and the carriage he was riding in with his six-year-old...

A professor managed US funding of computer science research for more than two years while failing to disclose that he was simultaneously involved in Chinese government programmes, according to previously unreported documents. The professor, Tao Li, was a programme officer at the National Science Foundation from 2015 to 2017, a job that included overseeing the awarding of grants for research in areas such as hardware, software and algorithms. During that time, Li took part in two Chinese talent...

Poland has ⁠arrested a ⁠Russian man who was ⁠hired by Moscow to kill a Ukrainian-American citizen in Warsaw, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Thursday. The Russian was detained on August ‌7 and had been recruited to kill a man who was “inconvenient to the Putin regime”, Tusk told journalists. The Russian embassy in Warsaw did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. Moscow has regularly ⁠dismissed accusations by European powers of attacks, saying the West ‌is stoking...

A blast at a ⁠storage facility for petroleum products at the Netherlands’ Rotterdam port killed one person and wounded six others on Thursday, officials said, as police investigated the cause of the explosion. A spokesperson for major energy commodities trading company Gunvor said an “incident” occurred during maintenance work on a storage tank. A police spokesperson said that there was no immediate ⁠sign of sabotage and that all possible scenarios were under ‌investigation. Rotterdam is...

German police said on Thursday that a suspicious object found on rail tracks in a Bavarian ‌town did not contain explosives, as initially feared. Earlier on Thursday, buildings near the object were evacuated in the town of Treuchtlingen for the item to ⁠be moved safely by a robot. Experts had earlier taken ‌X-ray images of the object that was found in the southern ‌part of the town. The public ⁠had ⁠been urged to steer clear of the area, which ‌was cordoned off, police also said on social...