Reuters World News - AfD win, Ukraine, glacier blankets and horse smuggling

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

Germany's far-right AfD wins in Saxony-Anhalt, edging closer to state-level power for the first time since World War Two. U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner talk up "new ideas" after shuttling between Moscow and Kyiv, but as winter closes in, hope on the streets wears thin. Rescuers pull a 64-year-old woman alive from the Nepal glacier disaster. Swiss researchers test sheep's wool blankets to slow Alpine glacier melt. And on the Texas-Mexico border, horse smugglers wade the Rio Grande, raising screwworm fears. 📲 Podcasts, breaking news, and video analysis from the source. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download the Reuters app here.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Listen to the Morning Bid podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.  Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Visit the ⁠⁠Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for information on our privacy and data protection practices.  You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm Kim Vinal in London. It's Monday, September 7th. Today. In Germany, the far-right AFD wins a key state election. US envoys Whitkoff and Kushner push for peace in Kiev. And scientists look at whether sheep wool can help slow glacier melt. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes, seven days a week.

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. We start with a shake-up in Germany's political landscape. The far-right alternative for Germany Party has won a historic victory in the state of Saxony-unholt, taking 44% of the vote. The win puts it within reach of governing at the state level for the first time since World War II.

Europe editor Rachel Armstrong has more. This election result will likely ricochet through Europe, not because Saxon and the Unheld is a particularly large state or because it will give the AFD enormous policy power, but because it will galvanise other far right at populist parties, particularly the national rally in France, and show them how this type of election result can be achieved. It will also mean German Chancellor Frederick Mertz

will have to be even more focused in the coming months and years on domestic politics to try and win back support for his party, which really collapsed in this election. So with him likely more focused on internal matters and French President Emmanuel Macron leaving the Elysset early next year ahead of an election that the far-right national rally might win, there may well be a vacuum in the EU where leadership from Berlin and Paris traditionally comes from.

And any potential vacuum in European leadership could have consequences felt beyond Germany's borders. Ukraine really needs European. in support right now. It is coming under relentless Russian airstrikes and is much more reliant on Europe than the US now for a lot of its financial and military needs. Now Berlin's support is unlikely to waver significantly overnight, but it may become harder for Merz to be the leader to push for tougher sanctions on Russia or greater support packages for Kiev, just as they head into what will be a brutal winter.

As that brutal winter approaches, the reality on the ground in Ukraine is stark. US peace envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff are talking up new momentum after meeting President Vladimir Zelenskyy in Kiev over the weekend. They flew there from Moscow, where they held talks with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. No breakthrough was announced at the Moscow talks, but Whitkoff says they heard, quote, new ideas, and hopes a new round of talks will be in a new round of talks will be in a lot of. announced soon. Since the last piece talks in February, each side has intensified long-range

air attacks deep inside the other's territory. Kiev resident Yulia describes the sense of total powerlessness as air alerts continue to ring out in the city. She says if it's going to kill me, it will. Vojia's producer Andrei Premiacenko describes a typical day in Kiev. The hardest thing about daily air attacks is you can't really sleep. During night you hear explosions, even though you can get used to hearing explosions, but you're still afraid. What if the next explosion is your house or a place you sleep?

Then you go to work. And still, you hear air raid alerts, you hear explosions. The traffic is really bad. if you have a car, if you don't have a car, you struggle to get where you need to get because transport doesn't operate quite in the same manner as it operates without aerial alerts. You get to the office like me and you still hear explosions, you smell the smoke. As the war rages on for almost five years now, a potentially harsh winter is fueling even more resignation. The last winter was very hard. It was very cold. But people thought that, okay, we live

through this winter, we get by, and maybe the war will be over when winter is over. But now it feels like people don't think so. People don't believe the war will be over after the winter. So it's like hope evaporated. BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming

Ontario. To Iran, where the Parliament's speaker is warning. that any further attacks will draw a heavier, faster and more painful response. Meanwhile, according to state media, Tehran will announce a new restricted zone outside the Strait of Hormuz in the coming days, one that would extend into parts of the Gulf. Details are thin, but the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council says any ship entering that new zone will be added to a sanctions list. Now, that move will be watched closely by traders. For a look at what oil markets are doing, and for the week ahead, here's Mike Dolan from our sister podcast MorningBin.

So the weekend developments have crude prices rising again first thing on Monday, and this is very significant because it's adding to pressure at the pump and at the retail cost of fuel, particularly in the United States. Diesel prices hit their all-time high on Friday, and that's going to be both a political and an economic issue as we head into the mid-term. terms. But as regards this week, there was a lot of politics all weekend, both in the Ukraine-Russia war and on the Gulf situation, and there has been no breakthrough in either. Thanks, Mike. You can catch morning bed wherever you get your podcasts. At least five people are dead after an Amazon Prime air cargo plane overran a runway and crashed at Miami International Airport on Sunday. The Boeing 767, which had just flown in from Puerto Rico, hit multiple vehicles on landing.

Five others were hospitalized. Three are in critical condition. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. Now to Nepal. Where 10 days after the devastating glacier collapse, a 64-year-old woman is pulled from her collapsed home by rescuers. Chandiga Kumari Shresta had survived in a narrow pocket of surrounded by water and mud.

Tens of thousands of people are still missing after the massive mudslide on the Himalayan border between Nepal and China's Tibet. With the Geyrong border crossing, now a grisly emblem of the devastation. It's where that incredible footage showed a wave of mud and debris enveloping buildings. Reuters went to that spot to view rescue efforts

in a trip organized by China's Foreign Ministry. Our reporter Niko-Chang sent us this from the ground. There's only one road that leads to this location, so first responders were first flown in via helicopter, while other emergency personnel were day and night using excavators to clear a path forward inch by inch. The path officially reopened Wednesday, allowing more emergency personnel and supplies to reach this critical location. As glaciers across the Alps keep shrinking, researchers in Switzerland are turning to an unlikely material to help retain. They've hacked them, sheep's wall. The Keep It Wall project has spent the summer testing

where the wall blankets can slow melting as effectively as the synthetic tarps often used on glaciers. Project manager Timothy Steiner says the team is pleased with the results. After taking measurements throughout the summer, he says melting under the wall covers was just as limited as under conventional synthetic coverings. The project is also aimed at finding a use for Swiss wool, much of which is currently discarded. But Steiner says protective coverings are only a temporary fix,

and that tackling climate change remains the only long-term way to slow the retreat of glaciers. In Redford, Texas, the Rio Grande is shallow enough in places to walk across. And according to local deputies, that's exactly what horse smugglers are doing. Reporter Cassandra Garrison spent days along remote stretches of the Texas-Mexico border investigating the illegal trade that authorities fear could complicate the fight against New World Screwworm. When you see the low water levels of the river that separates Mexico from the United States, it's easier to understand how animals could be smuggled across, basically undetected. Here in this area, there's no fences, there's no surveillance, there's nobody patrolling.

and that's the case for many areas of the U.S. border still in Texas. Deputies say smugglers simply walk across the river from Mexico to trailers waiting on the other side. Drivers pay about $1,000 to haul them to major cities like Houston or Dallas. Any animal moving from Mexico to the United States under normal circumstances would undergo government health inspections, checking for any tiny wounds where a screw room infection may have taken hold. But obviously, any animal smuggled from Mexico to the United States

would be operating outside the balance of those typical protocols, making it a greater risk for the screw room outbreak. Authorities haven't connected any US screw worm cases to these crossings. Experts warn that an outbreak of the flesh-eating parasite could cost the economy up to $1.8 billion. For more on any of the stories from today, as well as more analysis and news shaping our world, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app.

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