Morning Brief, Wednesday 9 September

The United States struck five Iranian crude tankers in the Gulf of Oman and near Kharg Island, after saying Iranian ballistic missiles had targeted an American warship in recent days. Iran then fired ballistic missiles toward military facilities in Jordan, where authorities said air defences intercepted 20 incoming missiles, destroyed 18 and recorded no casualties. Yemen’s Houthi movement separately launched missiles and drones at Abha, Khamis Mushait, Jazan and Najran, injuring 73 people and hitting energy installations, while Houthi officials described their operation as retaliation for Saudi airstrikes in Yemen.

Oil traders reacted quickly. Brent crude rose to $99.00 a barrel after touching $99.22, while West Texas Intermediate reached $94.41, as investors priced both physical disruption and the fear that chokepoints will stay troubled. The Strait of Hormuz, which carried about 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas before the wider war began in February, has seen traffic fall to its lowest volume since May, while Red Sea routes remain under pressure.

The danger is not just a higher petrol bill, but a conflict that now links missiles, ports, tankers and refineries into one combustible supply chain.

Britain, France and Canada joined nine other countries in banning commerce with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, a move that turns years of diplomatic complaint into a more concrete trade measure. Ed Miliband told parliament that Britain would prohibit settlement imports and sanction firms that finance, build or market infrastructure beyond the 1949 armistice line, while France began its own process after talks between French and British leaders. The coalition acted outside the European Union framework after bloc-wide measures failed to win enough support, with Germany and Italy among the governments resisting a common ban.

Israel answered with diplomacy of its own. The government ordered Britain’s consulate in East Jerusalem to close and removed British representatives from the International Gaza Support Centre, which coordinates relief and stabilization work in Gaza. Israeli officials reject the international description of the West Bank as occupied territory and argue that the land is disputed, while European diplomats pointed to settlement expansion, settler violence and the E1 construction zone between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim as the immediate trigger for action.

The policy split matters because it narrows the space between symbolic condemnation and economic pressure, while making the two-state formula less a shared slogan than a test of what governments are willing to stop buying.

Alternative for Germany won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, more than double its 2021 share, and finished only three seats short of an absolute majority in the state parliament. The Christian Democratic Union fell to 17.2%, while the Social Democrats, Greens, Die Linke and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance all entered a legislature where the old anti-AfD firewall now depends on exact votes, absences and discipline. AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund invited all parties to exploratory talks, while mainstream parties repeated that they would not govern with him.

The CDU’s local response did not exactly radiate renewal. Sven Schulze, the incumbent Minister-President and defeated lead candidate, won the CDU parliamentary group leadership by eight votes to seven after announcing that he would quit as state party chairman. The first two ballots for Minister-President require 42 votes, and the AfD holds 39 seats, the same total as the CDU, SPD, Greens and Die Linke combined. The BSW’s five seats therefore sit in the uncomfortable middle of the room, while the SPD has floated a cross-party expert administration to keep the AfD out.

Germany’s cordon sanitaire has survived as a principle; Saxony-Anhalt will show whether it can still function as a voting system.

The latest PISA results gave education ministers a hard number for a worry many parents already recognise: teenagers are getting worse at sustained reading and maths. Across OECD countries, average reading scores fell by 28 points between 2015 and 2025, roughly 1.5 years of learning, while maths dropped by 22 points. The assessment covered about 750,000 pupils across 91 countries and territories, and one in five 15-year-olds in OECD systems now lacks basic skills for further study or work.

Spain, France and Germany each supplied their own version of the same story. Spain recorded its lowest scores since PISA began in 2000, with a ten-year reading decline of 45 points. France’s reading score fell from 505 in 2012 to 456 in 2025, and one-third of French 15-year-olds now face severe reading-comprehension difficulties. Germany posted its weakest results on record, with roughly one in three pupils below basic proficiency in reading and maths.

Politicians blamed curricula, phones, social media, teacher shortages and Covid disruption, with some truth in each charge. But the sharper point is economic: countries that cannot teach pupils to read long texts and handle numbers will struggle to staff the very modern industries they keep trying to subsidise.

Mistral AI raised €3 billion in a Series D round led by Samsung, lifting the Paris start-up’s post-money valuation to €21 billion from €12 billion last year and €2 billion in late 2023. The company plans to put the money into research, products and European data centres, including projects near Paris and in Sweden, while aiming for 1 gigawatt of computing capacity in Europe by 2030. Samsung will use Mistral systems in semiconductor design and production, giving the European champion something better than slogans about sovereignty: an industrial customer with chips to make.

OpenAI, meanwhile, said an internal model had solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem after running about 10,000 autonomous agents for 88 hours, exchanging nearly 3 million messages and producing 130 billion output tokens. The claimed proof has not been validated by the Clay Mathematics Institute, which offers a $1 million prize for a verified solution. Independent researchers then questioned whether draft work done through OpenAI’s Codex harness could have influenced the result, while OpenAI denied that people or AI systems searched user data to solve the problem.

Europe wants its own AI champion, but the credibility of the whole field now depends as much on provenance as on processing power.