Saturday 19 September: fuel records and a Duma vote

World news

Iran hits another tanker in the Strait of Hormuz

Iran's Revolutionary Guard said it struck the Togo-flagged oil tanker Trend as the ship tried to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The Guard said the tanker caught fire and came to a halt; the shipping watchdog UKMTO put the spot about 16 nautical miles north-east of the Omani town of Khasab and said the crew was safe and no oil had leaked. It is the latest hit in a tanker war that has run for months and keeps a fifth of the world's oil trade at risk. Brent crude still ended Friday near 104 dollars a barrel, about one percent down on the day. (IranWire, The Hill, Trading Economics)

Suicide bomb at a mosque inside a Pakistani police base

A car packed with explosives was driven into the entrance of a mosque at a police headquarters in Kohat, in north-west Pakistan, during Friday prayers. At least 27 people were killed, among them 15 police officers, and about 75 were hurt. Gunmen then tried to storm the compound; six of the attackers were killed in the fight. A faction linked to Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur said it did it. Early reports on Friday morning put the toll at 21, which was later raised. (Al Jazeera, CBC)

Cuba's power grid collapses again

The whole of Cuba lost power on Friday after transmission lines failed in the west of the island and the eastern half was cut off as well. About nine million people were left in the dark. The state paper Granma also blamed unstable weather. By nightfall only about five percent of Havana's roughly 862,000 customers had power back. It is the sixth island-wide blackout since the United States cut off fuel supplies to Cuba in January. (US News, CP24)

World politics

Russia starts three days of voting for the Duma

Polling stations opened on Friday in Kamchatka, Chukotka and Magadan, and voting then moved west across the country. All 450 seats in the State Duma are up for grabs and about 111 million people can vote. This is Russia's first parliamentary election since the war in Ukraine began, and there is almost no opposition on the ballot. The Kremlin is watching turnout closely, because Vladimir Putin presents a high turnout as proof of national unity. Voting ends on Sunday. (PBS, Al Jazeera)

Trump says he has a deal with Denmark over Greenland

President Trump announced a deal that lets the United States build up its military presence in Greenland while the island stays with Denmark. He said it gives the United States permanent control over security there, at no cost, and called it an agreement with no end date. The text bans bases from countries outside NATO and is meant to keep China and Russia out. The office of Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen struck a more careful tone: it said the deal will be signed next week during the UN General Assembly, but that the Danish and Greenlandic parliaments still have to approve it first. (NBC News, Washington Post)

World economy

Bank of Japan lifts its rate to a 31-year high

The Bank of Japan raised its main rate by a quarter point, from 1 to 1.25 percent. That is the highest level since April 1995. The board split, voting seven to two, and governor Kazuo Ueda made no promise of further rises. Because of that, the yen weakened after the decision instead of gaining. The bank pointed to inflation nearing its two percent goal and to energy costs pushed up by the war with Iran. (Al Jazeera, Japan Times, UPI)

Warren Buffett steps down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway

Warren Buffett, who is 96, has given up the chairmanship of Berkshire Hathaway after more than sixty years at the top. "Father Time always wins," he said. He becomes chairman emeritus and stays on the board. His son Howard Buffett, a board member since 1993, takes over as chairman. It comes eight months after Buffett handed the job of chief executive to Greg Abel. (CNBC, NPR)

Dutch news

Data leak at drugstore chain DA hits 236,000 customers

Drugstore chain DA is warning customers of its web shop about a data leak. Outsiders got into a database at the start of September that held names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, home addresses and order details. In all, 236,000 customer records were involved, and everyone affected has had an email. DA says there is no sign the file was downloaded but cannot rule it out. Customers of the physical shops are not affected. The case has been reported to the Dutch data protection authority. (NOS)

Researchers: keep eight days of food at home, not three

Dutch households should have enough food in the cupboard for eight days instead of the three days the government now advises. That is the advice in a report by the Clingendael Institute and Erasmus University, written for the Ministry of Agriculture. The reason is that supermarkets and suppliers work so efficiently that there is almost no buffer left; after a cyber attack on supermarket logistics, shelves could be empty within two or three days. The researchers suggest food that keeps well, is high in calories and needs no cooking, such as tinned beans, because a big power cut makes hot meals hard. They also want the minister to agree a minimum stock with supermarkets and suppliers. (NOS)

KLM flight turns back after a power bank catches fire

A KLM flight to Curaçao had to return to Schiphol after a power bank started smoking and then burst in the cabin. The plane was five and a half hours into the trip, so passengers spent about eleven hours in the air and ended up back where they started. Dutch media report the device belonged to Camiel Eurlings, a former chief executive of KLM, who was charging it against the safety rules and was asleep when it went off. He had minor injuries. KLM will not confirm the name, citing privacy. (DutchNews, NL Times)

Dutch politics

Jetten invites six parties for budget talks, but not BBB

Prime Minister Rob Jetten is sending invitations to six opposition parties to talk about next year's budget: JA21, SGP, ChristenUnie, 50PLUS, Volt and PRO. BBB is not on the list, because it backed Geert Wilders' motion of no confidence on Thursday evening. That motion was supported only by the PVV, FVD and BBB, so the minority cabinet survived. Jetten said at his press conference that talks with BBB remain possible later, and named three priorities: making work pay better, tax rules that help investment, and a deal between unions and employers. BBB leader Henk Vermeer is annoyed at being left out. Within about two weeks it should be clear who will help the cabinet to a majority. (NOS, Rijksoverheid)

A national reporting point for incidents at mosques

From Sunday, mosque boards can report threats, graffiti, vandalism and violence online at a new national reporting point set up by the Contact Body for Muslims and Government, which covers nearly 400 mosques. The group says incidents are going up but nobody has a full picture, because few people use the existing channels. In 2025 police recorded 414 reports of discrimination against Muslims, of which only 20 involved mosques. Police welcome the new point and still ask people to report to them as well. (NOS, NL Times)

One hundred days of the EU migration pact

The European migration pact has now been in force for a hundred days. Since 12 June the Dutch immigration service has had to decide on an asylum claim within six months. Refugee aid group VluchtelingenWerk and asylum lawyers agree the procedure has got faster, but say speed is coming at the cost of care. They say weak points are missed, especially with people who have trauma or mental health problems, torture victims and victims of trafficking. One lawyer described a woman who only said she had been sexually abused after her interview, because no female interpreter was there. (NOS)

Dutch economy

Record prices at the pump, Germany cuts its fuel tax

Fuel prices hit records across Europe on Friday. The Dutch list price for a litre of petrol was about 2.71 euro and diesel about 2.81 euro, with diesel expected to set a new record on Saturday, above the April peak of 2.819 euro. In Germany diesel is at a record 2.471 euro and petrol at 2.308 euro. The German government and the federal states have agreed to cut excise duty on petrol and diesel by 17 cents a litre and to look at a price cap; according to Bild it could start on 1 October and run to the end of the year. The cause is the war in the Middle East and the squeeze on oil supply. Price trackers differ slightly on the Dutch petrol figure, putting it between 2.712 and 2.726 euro. (NOS, Business AM)

Almost half of planned new homes cannot get a power connection

Grid operators have received connection requests for around 600,000 homes due to be built in the next three years, and for nearly half of them there is no room on the electricity grid. Netbeheer Nederland says it has never had so many requests in a half year, and that requests for small connections are more than twice as high as last year. Part of that is a rule change on 1 July that pushed developers to apply early to avoid the waiting list. East Brabant is one of the worst spots. The cabinet says it will present a plan next week to speed up house building. (Reformatorisch Dagblad, Vastgoedjournaal)

Unilever sells Zwitsal to Royal Sanders

Unilever is selling the baby care brand Zwitsal, almost a hundred years old and known in the Netherlands and Belgium for its yellow packaging and its smell, to the Dutch company Royal Sanders. Unilever says the brand does not fit its plan to put money into big global names. Royal Sanders already owns brands such as Odorex and Sanicur. No price was given. Regulators still have to approve, and the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027. (RetailTrends, RetailDetail)

AI news

Anthropic says Claude now leads a quarter of the work on the next Claude

Anthropic published figures saying its model Claude led 26 percent of the company's research and engineering work in August, up from under one percent in February. "Leads" means the model does most of a task from one high-level instruction, with a person watching. Work at the level below, where the model works together with people, is now above 90 percent. The company says about 30,000 agents were doing research and engineering work in August, measured over 15,000 tasks, and that safety monitors blocked roughly one in every 47,000 actions. (NBC News, Build Fast with AI)

Chinese lab Zhipu speeds up its flagship model on home-made chips

The Chinese lab Zhipu, also known as Z.ai, released a faster version of its flagship model called GLM-5.3-FlashX. It says speed goes from thirty to fifty tokens a second up to a maximum of two hundred. The model runs on a cluster of more than 100,000 Chinese-made AI accelerators, which the company says nobody had operated at that scale before. Zhipu says much of the work on that system was done by its own agent rather than by human engineers. (BigGo Finance, Unite.AI)

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro goes on sale, a hundred dollars dearer

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max went on sale on Friday, the first iPhones under new chief executive John Ternus. The Pro starts at 1,199 dollars and the Pro Max at 1,299 dollars, a hundred dollars more than last year. Apple blames the worldwide shortage of memory and storage chips, which is being driven by demand from AI data centres. The jump is bigger on the roomier models: a terabyte version costs three hundred dollars more than last year. (Yahoo Finance)

India starts a second, bigger phase of its chip plan

At the SEMICON India fair in New Delhi, India set out the second phase of its semiconductor plan, worth 13.5 billion dollars against 8 billion in the first phase. The new goals named on Friday include at least 200 chip design firms and training for 100,000 factory and clean-room workers. The plan also covers equipment, materials, advanced packaging and research. Applied Materials announced a five billion dollar, ten-year plan for India, including a research park. (Business Today, 18 September, Business Today, 17 September)

Also

Sport: Kane is the fastest to a hundred Bundesliga goals

Bayern Munich beat Union Berlin seven to nil on Friday. Harry Kane scored his hundredth and hundred-and-first league goals in his 98th Bundesliga game, breaking Dieter Müller's record of 129 games to a century. Michael Olise scored three and set up another, his first hat-trick for the club. Bayern have ten points and go top of the table. (Bundesliga.com, beIN Sports)

Nature fact

This is the time of year when barn swallows line up on wires and gather in reed beds before leaving. They stay in the Netherlands from April to October and then fly to southern Africa. They go because the insects they live on disappear as it gets colder, not because of the cold itself. (Vogelbescherming)

On this day

On 19 September 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world where women could vote in national elections. It followed a petition led by Kate Sheppard with about 31,000 signatures, roughly a quarter of adult European women in the country. At the election that year about 80 percent of eligible women signed up and 82 percent of them voted. (NZ History, History.com)

Weather in Groningen

Grey, mild and breezy. It is around 16 degrees this morning and the temperature climbs to about 19 degrees in the afternoon. A south-westerly wind, force four, keeps blowing all day. There is a light drizzle risk through the day, and the best chance of a real shower is in the evening, after nine. Total rainfall stays small, around a millimetre. (KNMI)

On the agenda today

The Asian Games open in Aichi-Nagoya in Japan, with the opening ceremony at six in the evening Japanese time, which is eleven in the morning here. Almost 11,000 athletes will compete in 469 events over sixteen days. (Olympics.com)

Russia's Duma election runs into its second of three days; the result is expected on Sunday evening. (Al Jazeera)

The World Athletics Road Running Championships start in Copenhagen and run through Sunday. (Score and Change)

In Rotterdam, AVROTROS holds the final of the Junior Songfestival at the RTM Stage, where four acts compete to represent the Netherlands at the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. (AVROTROS)

And at the pumps, Dutch diesel is expected to set a new record price today. (NOS)