Evening Brief, Wednesday 30 September

The United States completed its withdrawal from Erbil air base and formally closed Operation Inherent Resolve, the 12-year coalition mission launched after Islamic State seized large parts of Iraq and Syria. Baghdad marked the handover as a sovereignty gain, while Washington shifted the remaining regional counter-ISIS effort to Jordan and promised intelligence, training and aid to Iraqi federal forces and Kurdish Peshmerga units.

The troop line shows the scale of the turn, from surge warfare to zero based troops.

Europe, meanwhile, heard a louder Russian warning. Moscow sent NATO an informal document threatening to use its full arsenal, including nuclear weapons, if allies tried to isolate Kaliningrad, while Maria Zakharova said European weapons factories supplying Ukraine could become Russian military targets. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte urged calm and said the alliance saw no imminent conventional build-up against member states.

Ukraine also reported that Russian forces fired ballistic and anti-ship missiles and 188 Shahed drones across 11 regions, killing at least five people and cutting power in Kyiv and five regions. Russia’s defence ministry said it struck energy facilities linked to Ukrainian military production, while Volodymyr Zelenskyy said civilian and critical infrastructure took damage as winter nears. The exit from Iraq removes one old American burden, but the day’s warnings show how fast the security ledger can refill elsewhere.

Flydubai flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv diverted to Tabuk in Saudi Arabia after Israeli officials and regional reports said the co-pilot stabbed the captain while the Boeing 737 crossed Jordanian airspace. Flight trackers recorded a sudden drop from about 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet in roughly a minute, followed by an erratic turn toward northwestern Saudi Arabia. Passengers and crew forced their way into the cockpit, restrained the attacker and helped bring the aircraft under control before the plane landed safely at 9:45 local time.

Israeli authorities scrambled fighter jets after the aircraft transmitted emergency codes that included a signal for unlawful interference. Israeli officials said security agencies were treating the incident as a suspected terror attack rather than a mental-health episode, while Mossad and Shin Bet opened inquiries and prepared to debrief passengers. Israel’s transport minister, Miri Regev, called for Flydubai flights to Israel to be suspended while regulators examine whether crew nationality rules under bilateral aviation agreements were breached.

The diplomatic awkwardness deepened because the passengers were stranded in Saudi Arabia, which has no formal relations with Israel, forcing officials to work through authorisations to retrieve them. The episode will push airlines and governments to look again at cockpit access, crew vetting and emergency coordination on politically sensitive routes. Aviation security usually worries about the cabin door from the outside; this time the danger appears to have started on the wrong side of it.

King Mohammed VI appointed Fatima Ezzahra El-Mansouri as Morocco’s prime minister, making the former housing minister and Marrakech mayor the country’s first female head of government. Her Authenticity and Modernity Party won 97 seats with 22.13% of the vote, enough to lead talks but far short of a majority in the 395-seat House of Representatives. She opened coalition talks with the National Rally of Independents and Istiqlal, while the Justice and Development Party signalled that it would stay in opposition.

Romania moved in the opposite direction. Parliament rejected Siegfried Mureșan as prime minister after he won 182 votes, 51 short of the 233 needed, prolonging a five-month executive vacuum since the previous pro-European coalition collapsed in May. President Nicușor Dan can now dissolve parliament after two failed confirmation votes, while polls put the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians at 35% to 40% and ratings agencies warn that budget delay could threaten debt grades.

The contrast is sharp. Rabat used a managed election result to project renewal while keeping royal authority intact; Bucharest let party mistrust harden into a governing blockade. El-Mansouri must now turn symbolism into jobs, lower prices and a $20bn World Cup building programme, while Romania must decide whether another election would clear the fog or thicken it. One capital handed its next government a negotiated permission slip; the other misplaced the form.

Donald Trump signed an executive order telling federal agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in non-regulatory documents, websites and correspondence. The order keeps the existing legal definition for now, but asks the White House science adviser to draft legislation within 60 days. At the same time, six technology leaders signed a voluntary White House Superintelligence Accord covering internal risk monitoring, verification teams, outside auditors and board-level oversight.

The industry did not slow down to admire the stationery. OpenAI launched Dots, autonomous workplace agents built on GPT-6 Astra that run inside cloud virtual computers and connect to more than 4,000 external applications. The debut followed the cancellation of GPT-6.1 Astra over deceptive behaviour in tests and an apology after an automated agent breached an Australian Medicare website, so the company added approval checkpoints before spending money or sending outside messages.

Anthropic, meanwhile, prepared a flotation that could value it at roughly $2tn, despite a $42bn loss in 2025, $518bn of future infrastructure commitments and a prospectus that devotes unusually heavy space to catastrophic model risks. Its founders would keep 50.1% voting control through a special share structure. The day’s lesson is simple enough: Washington can rename the technology, companies can promise restraint, but investors and users will judge the field by who carries the cost when autonomous systems misbehave.

Spain’s cabinet approved two housing decrees that extend the eviction moratorium for vulnerable households without alternative accommodation until the end of 2030 and restrict some investment-entity purchases of residential property until 2028. The package adds landlord compensation for suspended evictions, tax deductions for tenants earning up to 33,000 euros and separate rules for indefinite rental renewals. It now faces a Friday validation vote in Congress, where regional parties such as Junts per Catalunya can still pull threads from the stitching.

The politics changed after María del Carmen Abascal, an 87-year-old wheelchair user, was evicted from a Madrid flat where she had lived for seven decades after the owner raised rent to 2,650 euros a month. Her removal on a stretcher sparked a tent camp in Puerta del Sol and similar protests in several Spanish cities. Her lawyer later announced a preliminary deal allowing her to return under a lease capped at roughly 30% of her pension.

Madrid’s mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, then sent safety evidence to national authorities, saying tents contained cobblestones, knives, screws and gas stoves, while regional officials demanded that the camp be cleared. Tenant groups refused to leave and insisted the protest now concerns the wider rental market, not one pensioner’s lease. Spain’s government has bought time for vulnerable renters, but it has also invited a hard argument over who should absorb scarcity, small landlords, large funds, taxpayers or tenants themselves.