Evening Brief, Monday 7 September

Alternative for Germany won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its vote from five years ago and taking 39 seats in the 83-seat parliament in Magdeburg. The Christian Democratic Union fell to 17.2%, while the SPD, Greens, The Left and BSW split the rest of the field, leaving the AfD three seats short of an outright majority but clearly ahead of every established party.

• AfD43.8
• CDU17.2
• SPD9.3
• Greens8.9
• The Left8.6
• BSW5.3

Friedrich Merz rejected any CDU cooperation with the AfD, but the result still weakens his authority in Berlin and gives Ulrich Siegmund's regional party a chance to pressure smaller factions and individual lawmakers. The CDU has governed Saxony-Anhalt continuously since 2002, so Sven Schulze's decision to move into opposition marks more than a routine alternation of power.

“This is the heaviest electoral defeat the CDU has suffered in years, in decades.”

The numbers also carry a darker label: Saxony-Anhalt's domestic intelligence service classifies the AfD branch as a confirmed right-wing extremist group. BSW's 5.3% gives it leverage, especially because AfD and BSW together hold a numerical majority, even if their leaders differ on whether to cooperate. Magdeburg has become a rehearsal room for the question Berlin hoped to postpone: how long a firewall holds when voters keep piling furniture against it.

The United States and Iran traded fresh strikes around the Strait of Hormuz after a monthlong lull, with US forces hitting Iranian rocket, mine and tanker targets, while Iran's Revolutionary Guard said it struck tankers using unauthorised routes and American vessels. Brent reached $96.80 a barrel on Monday after gaining 7.8% last week, while West Texas Intermediate rose to $92.14, tightening the link between naval risk and household fuel bills.

• 10-day daily average10
• 5 Sep2
• 6 Sep6

Shipping data show the squeeze. Kpler recorded an average of only 10 cargo ships a day through the strait over the past ten days, with two crossings on 5 September and six on 6 September; LSEG said one Saudi crude tanker turned back, and Kpler reported no supertankers exiting since 2 September.

“The strait is neither fully closed nor fully opened. Iran can't close it completely, and the U.S. can't open it completely.”

Iran now says it will create an exclusion zone in the Gulf and sanction ships that enter without authorisation, while OPEC+ held October production levels steady rather than opening the taps. Goldman Sachs put a wide range around the next move, with oil at $120 if disruptions widen and $80 if exports normalise. Oil markets now trade not just barrels, but confidence in whether two armed states can bruise a chokepoint without breaking it.

Israeli air strikes hit Kfar Remmane shortly after midnight, killing at least 11 people, according to Lebanon's National News Agency. Lebanese reporting said nine people, including two infants, died when a three-storey residential building collapsed, while a second strike killed two paramedics in a civilian car; the Israeli military said it was reviewing reports of the incident. Many families had returned after a June ceasefire, but the new strikes sent residents fleeing again from damaged streets near Nabatieh. One local man said the destroyed building housed people with no link to Hezbollah, and the Kfar Remmane strike came without the kind of prior evacuation warning Israeli forces issued before hitting a Hezbollah-linked site in nearby Deir Zahrani.

“Since we returned, we have been living in anguish.”

The broader pattern looks like a ceasefire being pulled apart piece by piece. Israel said Hezbollah drone launches and rebuilding attempts breached the accord; Lebanese President Joseph Aoun appealed to Washington and others to stop Israeli operations, while Israeli forces have also seized the Ali Taher ridge and maintained control of a border strip about 10 kilometres inside southern Lebanon. The truce was never peace, but each round of rubble makes even managed hostility harder to sell to civilians who had just unpacked.

An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767-300 freighter overran runway 30 at Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon after arriving from San Juan, crossed a perimeter road and struck several ground vehicles near an Amazon warehouse. Five people died and five others were injured, including three taken to hospital in critical condition, before the aircraft came to rest more than 100 metres from the tarmac under black smoke. More than 200 Miami-Dade Fire Rescue personnel tackled the fire and pulled survivors from both vehicles and the cockpit. The left engine kept running after impact, forcing responders to flood it with water after the crew reported that the electrical system had to be activated to shut it down.

“A couple of victims that were actually trapped in the vehicles, so a complex extraction with our technical rescue team started to occur.”

The airport halted operations, closed the runway and cancelled nearly 200 flights before reopening unaffected runways later on Sunday. The National Transportation Safety Board sent a go-team, while Amazon and 21 Air, the charter carrier operating the 32-year-old converted freighter, pledged to cooperate with investigators. A runway overrun is usually a technical phrase; in Miami it now means federal investigators must explain how a cargo landing reached the workers and drivers beyond the fence.