Evening Brief, Tuesday 8 September

Britain, France, Canada and nine other countries announced coordinated import bans and trade restrictions on goods produced in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The move followed failed efforts to secure a European Union-wide embargo and targeted settlement-linked businesses, housing and transport infrastructure rather than Israel as a whole. British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament that London regarded the settlements and occupation as unlawful, while French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Paris would end such commerce alongside its partners.

Israel retaliated against Britain with diplomatic penalties. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar ordered the closure of the British consulate in Jerusalem and imposed entry bans on 12 unnamed British nationals, while Israeli ministers accused London of attacking Israel under cover of legal language. European officials pointed to the E1 settlement plan, with more than 1,200 homes, as a trigger because it would further break up territorial continuity in the West Bank, where more than 500,000 Israeli settlers live alongside roughly three million Palestinians.

The sanctions do not end the occupation or force an Israeli policy reversal. They do change the cost of treating settlement expansion as a routine retail matter, and they show that several Western governments now prefer national action to waiting for EU unanimity. The two-state formula has survived for years as a diplomatic slogan; this week it acquired customs paperwork.

Yemen's Houthi movement launched ballistic missiles and drones at four Saudi cities, hitting King Khalid Air Base and Saudi Aramco facilities in Abha, Najran and Jazan. Saudi officials said at least 73 people were wounded, including women and children, and authorities temporarily suspended operations at several energy installations after fires broke out. Brent crude rose more than 2% and passed $99 a barrel as traders priced in fresh risk to Red Sea and Gulf-linked supply routes.

Saudi aircraft then struck areas around Marib and Jubah in Yemen, while Houthi officials said their barrage answered 121 Saudi airstrikes over three days. The wider pattern matters more than any single salvo. The informal truce that had muted large-scale fighting since 2022 has frayed, fighting along Yemen's western coast displaced more than 18,500 people in three days, and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait again looks exposed as an energy chokepoint.

Russia also resumed missile and drone strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian regions after a 72-hour pause during visits by American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Ukrainian officials reported two deaths and damage across residential districts, a school, a clinic and railway infrastructure, while Russia's Defence Ministry said it targeted Ukrainian drone and cruise-missile production and logistics sites. Romania separately detained a Russian citizen suspected of filming NATO bases and Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft for a sabotage plot, an allegation Moscow has not answered publicly.

These conflicts now travel along infrastructure: refineries, railways, drones, ports, bases and cables. The battlefield is no longer only where soldiers stand; it is where economies must keep moving.

Alternative for Germany won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, a result that gave the party 39 seats in the 83-member state parliament and left it three seats short of an absolute majority. The Christian Democrats fell to 17.2%, roughly halving their support and shrinking to 15 seats, their worst state result since reunification. Sven Schulze, the acting minister-president, won a knife-edge vote to lead the CDU parliamentary group, defeating Guido Heuer by eight votes to seven.

The result moved from Magdeburg to Berlin quickly. Tino Schomann, a deputy CDU chair in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, called for Chancellor Friedrich Merz to resign after what he described as an unconvincing response to the defeat.

Coalition-building now looks ugly. Most established parties reject formal cooperation with AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund, while the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance holds five seats and may shape the arithmetic if it chooses to talk. A Civey survey found 54% of respondents judged the result bad for German democracy, while 29% favoured a CDU-AfD coalition and the same share rejected all tested options.

Germany's cordon sanitaire has not collapsed, but it has become much more expensive to maintain. The CDU can still refuse AfD; it can no longer pretend that refusal is a strategy.

The OECD released PISA 2025 results after testing about 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries and territories, and the pattern was hard to miss. Spain recorded its lowest scores in the assessment's history, with reading falling to 451 points, mathematics to 457 and science to 477. Germany also posted its weakest results since the test began, averaging 465 in reading and 464 in mathematics, while France fell to 456 in reading and 458 in mathematics after a long decline since 2012.

The diagnoses differed, but the suspects looked familiar. Ministers and researchers blamed screen habits, weaker reading stamina, teacher shortages, uneven training and lingering damage from pandemic-era disruption. In Germany, roughly one in three pupils failed to reach basic proficiency in reading and mathematics, and researchers warned that the share lacking basic skills in all three tested fields had doubled in reading and mathematics since 2015.

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Poland offered a useful counterpoint rather than an escape route. Its students scored 482 in reading, 484 in mathematics and 495 in science, above both EU and OECD benchmarks, but officials still noted that one in four Polish 15-year-olds failed basic mathematical proficiency and that outcomes remain below 2018 levels. Samuel Greiff, the German study lead, captured the sober version of optimism.

The classroom slide will hit budgets later, through weaker skills, lower earnings and thinner workforces. Europe can blame phones for a while, but eventually it must teach children well enough that the excuse stops working.