The briefing for Monday, September 7.

Iranian state media reported Sunday that the country's Navy attacked an American remote-controlled vessel attempting to enter the Strait of Hormuz. The US military flatly denied the claim, with Centcom spokesperson Captain Tim Hawkins calling it "a total lie," according to the Associated Press. Iran's parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf said the era of "proportionate responses" is over, warning Iran's retaliation will be "faster, heavier and more painful."

The exchange comes after a 60-day ceasefire between the US and Iran formally expired last month, reigniting fighting that has continued for a full week. The US has struck Iranian targets while Iran has retaliated against US interests across the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that if Iran shoots at US ships, the US "will destroy (and sink) their oil tankers." Separately, a top Iranian official said Tehran plans to announce an "exclusion zone" outside the strait targeting vessels it believes are attempting to transit the waterway.

The Strait of Hormuz, critical to global oil and gas flows, has been effectively closed since the six-month-long war began in February, giving Iran significant leverage even as President Trump insists the strait is "open." US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Sunday that roughly 9 million barrels of oil a day are still moving through the strait, or about two-thirds of pre-conflict flows.

The conflict is now directly hitting American wallets ahead of the November midterms. The average US diesel price hit a record $5.85 a gallon on Friday, compared to $3.71 a year ago. Wright said prices should begin easing as summer driving demand wanes, but offered no firm timeline for relief.

US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Kyiv on Sunday for their first official visit to Ukraine as part of a renewed peace push, more than four and a half years after Russia's full-scale invasion. The trip follows a three-hour closed-door meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Saturday that ended without major announced breakthroughs. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his government is ready for a "constructive" discussion, adding on Telegram that "a just and sustainable postwar peace is needed."

Putin's foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov described the Moscow talks as "constructive, frank and useful" but declined to share specific outcomes, noting that economic issues and potential joint US-Russia projects were also discussed in detail. The diplomatic push comes as Washington's peace efforts had lost momentum amid the Trump administration's focus on the Iran war; the last known Witkoff-Kushner visit to Moscow was in January.

Despite an agreed pause on strikes against each other's capitals during the talks, Russia and Ukraine traded fire overnight into Sunday. Russian attacks killed one person and wounded at least 10 others across multiple Ukrainian regions, while Ukraine's air force said it intercepted 82 of 108 Russian drones launched overnight. Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses shot down 258 Ukrainian drones over the same period.

Reactions on the ground were mixed. Nataliia Lipei, who lost her son in the war, told the AP she hopes the talks "will definitely produce results." But 27-year-old Oleksandr Pastukhov was skeptical, noting Ukraine has seen similar delegations before without lasting change.

Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party swept to a landslide victory in Sunday's regional election in Saxony-Anhalt, falling just short of an outright majority but positioning itself for a possible first right-wing populist state government since the Nazi era. Support for Chancellor Friedrich Merz's center-right Christian Democrats fell by half, while AfD more than doubled its vote share after 24 years of CDU rule in the state.

AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund is now seeking a governing coalition, with the hard-left BSW party — which shares AfD's Russia-friendly and anti-immigration positions — expressing openness to helping an AfD governor take power. Germany's mainstream parties have long maintained a "firewall" against cooperating with AfD, which domestic intelligence classifies as extremist in some regions. Analysts note that a five-party coalition excluding AfD would be historically unusual and prone to instability; alternatively, just three defecting lawmakers could hand AfD a majority.

The result reverberated beyond Germany. President Trump posted the Saxony-Anhalt exit poll on Truth Social, while Russian businessman Kirill Dmitriev called the outcome "historic" and described Germany's government as "discredited." Spain's Vox party leader hailed the result as "a great hope for Germany and for Europe," while France's Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad called it "a serious moment in Europe."

The vote lands at a precarious moment for the EU's largest economy, which faces Russian aggression in Ukraine, a suspected NATO sabotage campaign, and tense dealings with the Trump administration. With a bumper EU election season ahead in France, Italy, Spain and Poland, Brussels is watching closely for signs that far-right momentum could spread further across the continent.

Israeli air strikes on the village of Kfar Remman in southern Lebanon killed at least nine people overnight, according to Lebanon's health ministry. One strike destroyed a three-story residential building, killing eight people including a child and a woman and injuring 11 others; a second strike on a vehicle killed a paramedic from an emergency service linked to Hezbollah. The strikes came a day after separate Israeli attacks killed seven people across southern Lebanon.

The Israeli military said it was reviewing the reports, while Israel's foreign ministry accused Hezbollah of "repeated drone attacks" and attempting to rebuild military capabilities in southern Lebanon, alleging the group had violated the ceasefire. Lebanon's health ministry called the death toll "further irrefutable evidence" of violations of international law.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun warned that the "dangerous escalation" is jeopardizing June's US-brokered ceasefire, which required Hezbollah to disarm and Israeli forces to gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon. He urged the international community to pressure Israel to halt the attacks.

The strikes come against the backdrop of a broader conflict that began in March when Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel after a strike killed Iran's supreme leader. Since then, at least 4,354 people have been killed in Lebanon, according to the health ministry's figures, while Israeli authorities report 40 soldiers and four civilians killed on both sides of the border.

Video footage obtained by the BBC shows Omar al-Bayoumi, the man at the heart of a $1 trillion lawsuit brought by 9/11 families against Saudi Arabia, had extensive links to Saudi government officials and socialized with future al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki. The footage, which the FBI had within days of the 2001 attacks, contradicts Bayoumi's 25 years of denials that he was an extremist or a Saudi spy. One clip shows him embracing Awlaki; another shows the two paintballing near San Diego alongside an official from Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Islamic Affairs.

The lawsuit alleges Saudi Arabia was complicit in the attacks and that Bayoumi aided two of the 19 hijackers. He was arrested by London's Metropolitan Police days after 9/11, and the videos were found among his possessions along with a diagram of a plane with a flight descent equation. That diagram was shared with multiple FBI agents but never passed to British interrogators holding Bayoumi, nor to the 9/11 Commission investigating the attacks. Bayoumi was never prosecuted, and neither he nor the Saudi government responded to BBC requests for comment; both have consistently denied involvement.

BBC Panorama and Radio 4 examined thousands of documents declassified under a Biden-era executive order and interviewed dozens of investigators to piece together why the evidence was never fully pursued. Findings include that FBI agents in San Diego repeatedly requested copies of evidence but never received most of it, and that the Los Angeles and San Diego FBI offices were blocked from interviewing Bayoumi's Saudi government contacts.

The revelations arrive a quarter-century after the attacks, reviving long-standing questions about Saudi government complicity and possible intelligence failures. With the lawsuit ongoing, the newly surfaced evidence could shape both the legal proceedings and public understanding of one of the most scrutinized unresolved threads of the 9/11 investigation.