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Nigerian Police Rescue 20 Young Graduates Abducted on Their Way to National Service Camps: October 8, 2026

Twenty young graduates who were kidnapped in Nigeria last week while traveling to begin compulsory national service have been rescued, police said, BBC News reported.

The group was seized on Oct. 1 when gunmen attacked two buses carrying them on a major highway from Ibadan, in southwestern Oyo state, to National Youth Service Corps orientation camps in Abia and Akwa Ibom states. Police spokesman Ani Iniedu said in a statement Wednesday that they were freed at Amakohia Ubi in Imo State after a sustained search-and-rescue operation by police with the military and other security agencies, and that they had been taken for medical evaluation.

Iniedu did not say whether a ransom was paid or whether anyone had been arrested, but said efforts were under way to catch the kidnappers. Police had earlier said they had found where the group was being held but could not move in because the site was mined with explosives. Before the rescue, the father of one captive, Omotosho Adewale, told the BBC the kidnappers had demanded 50 million naira, about $37,680, which he could not afford. “There’s no peace of mind. I’ve not eaten in three days,” he said.

The National Youth Service Corps is a mandatory one-year community service program for most Nigerian university graduates. Kidnapping for ransom is a major security problem in Nigeria, and the government’s ban on paying ransoms has had little effect, according to the BBC report. Authorities have not identified the attackers.

Sources: BBC News

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Italy’s Parliament Passes Meloni’s Electoral Overhaul With a Bonus-Seat Prize for the Winner: October 8, 2026

ROME — Italy’s parliament on Thursday approved a fiercely contested overhaul of the country’s electoral system championed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, ahead of national elections due by next year, BBC News reported.

Lawmakers voted 227 to 164 in a secret ballot to replace the current hybrid system, in which about a third of seats are filled by first-past-the-post contests, with a fully proportional one. A party or coalition that tops 42 percent will receive bonus seats — up to 70 in the 400-seat Chamber of Deputies and 35 in the Senate — which could turn a narrow win into a comfortable majority. Coalitions must also name their joint candidate for prime minister and publish their program before the vote.

Meloni had warned she could resign and trigger an early election if the reform failed. Opponents say it is designed to keep her right-wing coalition in power. “Go ahead and change the electoral law, we will win in any case under any voting system,” Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein said during the debate. Riccardo Magi of the More Europe party, who went on a hunger strike against the bill, called it an “anti-democratic law,” Al Jazeera reported.

“To those who hoped to see the centre-right divided, today we respond with facts: we are united, cohesive, and determined to carry forward the commitments made to citizens,” Meloni wrote on social media after the vote, according to the BBC. Her government recently became Italy’s longest-serving since World War II. Her term ends in October 2027, and the next general election must be held by Dec. 22, 2027, though it could be brought forward to the spring.

Sources: BBC News, Al Jazeera

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Russian Glide Bomb Strike on Buses in Kramatorsk Kills at Least 30: October 8, 2026

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — A Russian glide bomb struck two passenger buses in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Thursday morning, killing at least 30 people and wounding 18, Ukrainian officials said, in one of the deadliest attacks on civilians this year, BBC News, The Guardian and DW reported.

The Donetsk regional prosecutor’s office said the vehicles were hit at 10 a.m. by an aerial bomb near a dental clinic on Yuvileina Street; one bus was reduced to a charred shell and a second caught fire. Three more people were killed in the nearby village of Bilenke. Prosecutors opened an investigation into a suspected war crime. Regional governor Vadym Filashkin accused Russia of deliberately targeting civilian transport: “For them, a bus with passengers is an attractive target precisely because one strike can kill as many people as possible,” he said, according to DW. All public transport in Kramatorsk and neighboring Sloviansk was suspended.

“This strike will not go without our response,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Telegram, according to the BBC. “Russia is trying to destroy all life in Donbas, and the world needs to react to this.” He urged allies to supply anti-ballistic systems and interceptors. Moscow did not immediately comment.

The strike came a day after a missile destroyed a five-story apartment block in Pryluky, where the death toll rose to 22, including five children. Russian strikes on Kyiv on Thursday killed three people, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said, and emergency power outages were ordered in the capital, the Associated Press reported via NPR. Kramatorsk and Sloviansk form part of the “fortress belt,” the last major cities in northern Donetsk under full Ukrainian control. UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, visiting Kyiv, announced new sanctions on Russia.

Sources: BBC News, The Guardian, DW, Associated Press (via NPR)

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Helicopters Pluck Residents From Floodwaters as Chile’s Mapocho River Bursts Its Banks: October 8, 2026

TALAGANTE, Chile — Police in central Chile used helicopters to rescue residents trapped by floodwaters after torrential rain caused the Mapocho River to burst its banks, flooding large parts of Talagante, about 22 miles southwest of the capital, Santiago, BBC News reported.

Carabineros air units rescued 17 people — 13 adults and four children — who had been stranded on a kind of islet in the riverbed, Chile’s 24 Horas reported. About 100 people and their pets were evacuated from an informal camp by the river, where water rose almost a meter high, and some 200 homes in Talagante were flooded. “This camp has to be cleared, it is in the riverbed. What we are seeing is not unheard of,” said Germán Codina, the presidential delegate for the Santiago Metropolitan Region.

Officials said one person was found dead in a flooded underpass in San Bernardo, south of Santiago, though they had not confirmed the cause of death. Dirt roads in the riverside community turned into rivers; unlike during storms in July, the area had not been evacuated ahead of the downpours, the BBC said.

Santiago recorded 74 millimeters of rain in the first seven days of October, making it the area’s rainiest October in 76 years, meteorologists said. They warned that this year’s unusually strong El Niño is likely to keep bringing wet weather, powerful winds and storms to the region through the southern spring, according to the BBC report.

Sources: BBC News, 24 Horas

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Isaias Becomes the Atlantic Season’s First Hurricane as Warnings Go Up From Mississippi to Florida: October 8, 2026

MIAMI — Isaias strengthened into the first hurricane of the Atlantic season late Wednesday and kept intensifying over the Gulf on Thursday, with a hurricane warning now in effect from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to the Bay/Gulf County line in the Florida Panhandle, the National Hurricane Center said.

Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft found that Isaias had become a hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph at 10:30 p.m. CDT Wednesday, the center said. By 7 a.m. CDT Thursday, its winds had reached 80 mph, and it was centered about 175 miles north-northwest of Progreso, Mexico, and 385 miles south-southwest of the mouth of the Mississippi River, moving east-northeast at 9 mph. Forecasters expect additional strengthening through early Friday and landfall within the warning area late Friday or early Saturday.

A storm surge warning covers the coast from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Steinhatchee River in Florida. The hurricane center warned of 5 to 7 feet of surge from Ocean Springs to Indian Pass, Florida, including Mobile Bay, and urged residents to follow evacuation orders. “Residents in these areas should prepare for the possibility of long-duration power outages,” its forecast discussion said, adding that Isaias was forecast to come close to major-hurricane strength within 24 hours. Rainfall of 3 to 7 inches, locally up to 10, is expected from far southeastern Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, along with isolated tornadoes.

Coastal communities were stocking up on supplies, boarding up windows and gathering sandbags, NPR reported. The storm also pushed up oil prices: Shell and Chevron said they were shutting down production in the Gulf of Mexico as Isaias approached, The Guardian reported, and Brent crude rose 5 percent to $105.30 a barrel on Thursday.

Sources: National Hurricane Center, NPR, The Guardian

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Canadian Poet Anne Carson Wins the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature: October 8, 2026

STOCKHOLM — Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced, honoring a writer celebrated for work that crosses the lines between poetry, fiction, scholarship and translation.

The academy cited Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature,” according to the official press release. Ingrid Carlberg, the academy’s permanent secretary, said she reached Carson by phone in Iceland shortly before the announcement. “She was taken by surprise but very happy. I could hear that in her voice,” Carlberg said, BBC News reported.

Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson, 76, has taught classics for more than 30 years, and much of her writing draws on ancient Greek literature and myth. Her best-known book, Autobiography of Red (1998), is a novel in verse that reimagines the myth of Geryon, the red-winged monster killed by Herakles, as the story of a modern teenage boy, The Guardian said. Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, appeared in 1986. In 2001 she became the first woman to win the T.S. Eliot Prize, for The Beauty of the Husband. Other works include The Glass Essay, Nox, Float and translations of Sappho and Sophocles.

Anders Olsson, chair of the academy’s Nobel committee for literature, said Carson had “broken away from lyrical poetry bound to the narrative self and inspired new forms of contemporary literature.” She lives in Michigan and has held Icelandic citizenship since 2022, the BBC said. DW noted she is only the 19th woman among the prize’s laureates. The award carries 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday.

Sources: NobelPrize.org, BBC News, The Guardian, DW

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World Brief, Evening: October 7, 2026

Rescuers in Pryluky pulled a fifth child from the rubble as Ukraine’s death toll from Russia’s birthday barrage climbed to 25; hurricane watches went up along the U.S. Gulf Coast for a fast-strengthening Isaias; and the WHO said it still doesn’t have “the full picture” from Moscow on the Siberian plague scare. Ten stories as of Wednesday evening, October 7.

1. Pryluky / Ukraine. The toll from a Russian missile strike on a five-storey apartment block in Pryluky, east of Kyiv, rose through the day to 19 dead, including five children — three of them one-year-olds — with 30 flats destroyed as families slept, BBC News reported. One boy, Sasha, died with his mother and grandmother; only his older sister survived. Nationwide, Wednesday’s death toll reached 25, with two killed each in Kyiv, Kremenchuk and Oleksandriya, and more than 430 homes damaged in Kremenchuk. Chernihiv regional head Vyacheslav Chaus said Pryluky was hit by five cruise missiles. Ukraine’s air force said it downed five ballistic and 39 cruise missiles and more than 100 drones, meaning as many as 26 missiles got through, and President Volodymyr Zelensky renewed his call for air defence. Moscow said its “massive strike” targeted military industries and did not mention Pryluky. Separately, NATO said its Military Committee — the military representatives of all 32 allies, led by Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone — visited Kyiv on Tuesday, its first official visit in eight years.

2. Northern Gulf Coast / United States and Mexico. Tropical Storm Isaias was quickly intensifying over the southwestern Gulf on Wednesday evening, with 65mph winds about 200 miles west-northwest of Progreso, Mexico, and is forecast to become a hurricane by Thursday morning and make landfall on the U.S. northern Gulf Coast late Friday or early Saturday, the National Hurricane Center said. A hurricane watch now runs from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, to Indian Pass, Florida, and a storm surge watch from the mouth of the Mississippi River to Yankeetown, Florida. Forecasters warned of 5–7 feet of surge from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to Indian Pass, including Mobile Bay, and 3–7 inches of rain, locally up to 10, from far southeastern Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. Isaias would be the Atlantic season’s first hurricane.

3. Irkutsk / Russia. “We don’t yet have the full picture of this event and we’re not able to conduct a full risk assessment,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday of the death of 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, a worker at Irkutsk’s anti-plague institute, The Guardian reported. The WHO has asked Moscow about media reports of a second employee with pneumonia of undetermined cause; Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “the vast majority” of media reporting on the case was “false information,” Al Jazeera reported. Russia has not confirmed pneumonic plague and says there is no epidemic risk. President Donald Trump said he has a call set up with Vladimir Putin and doesn’t believe it is a bioweapon — “we’re going to find out soon enough, but we don’t think so,” he told reporters, per BBC News — though Peskov said no call had been scheduled. The CDC called the risk to the U.S. “extremely low.”

4. Strait of Hormuz / Iran. Attacks on tankers around the Strait of Hormuz hit their highest weekly count since the U.S.–Iran war began on February 28 — at least 12 on oil, LNG and LPG tankers in the week of September 28–October 5, according to maritime security sources cited by Reuters. Speaking in Athens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio nonetheless said Iran had “lost complete control” of the strait because “there’s almost as much oil flowing out now as there was before this conflict began,” CBS News reported, while Vice President JD Vance said Tehran must make a “meaningful” reduction in its enrichment capacity — a possible softening of the earlier demand for no enrichment at all, Al Jazeera said. Oil rose on the attack reports, then fell back after International Energy Agency members said they stand ready to release more reserves, prioritising diesel, and Wall Street closed lower, Al Jazeera reported.

5. Riyadh and Abha / Saudi Arabia. Houthi attacks on two Saudi airports on Tuesday and Wednesday killed three people and injured 36, Saudi Arabia’s civil aviation authority said, Al Jazeera reported. Two foreign residents were killed and 28 people hurt at Abha International Airport, and a Sudanese man was killed and eight injured at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh. In Yemen, Houthi forces appeared to be making slow advances toward the city of Taiz and fired at the airport in Aden, the government’s main hub, moments before a flight from Cairo was due to land, forcing it to divert to Jeddah, The Guardian reported.

6. Adigrat / Ethiopia. Eritrean troops have crossed into northern Ethiopia and are moving deep into Tigray, residents of the town of Adigrat told BBC News. “I saw about 40 trucks carrying soldiers. The convoy was moving south,” one resident said; others described convoys with Eritrean plates heading toward Edaga Hamus, between Adigrat and the regional capital Mekelle, which national army troops took over at the weekend after Tigrayan forces withdrew. The BBC said it has not independently verified the movements. Fighting broke out two weeks ago between the federal army and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, each blaming the other for breaking the 2022 peace deal, and Ethiopia and Eritrea severed diplomatic relations last week. Eritrean troops fought alongside Ethiopia’s army in the 2020–22 war and were accused of atrocities.

7. Madrid / Spain. Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old whose eviction from her Madrid flat of more than 70 years sparked nationwide housing protests and helped trigger a snap election, has died, the Madrid Tenants’ Union said, BBC News reported. No cause of death was given. The firm that owned the flat, which had raised her rent from €500 to €2,650 a month, later offered to let her return at a lower rate, but she was in hospital. Mourners lit candles in Puerta del Sol, where an encampment is on its 12th night, and a few hundred marched toward Congress. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote “Rest in peace,” and opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo also offered condolences, The Guardian reported. Spain votes November 29.

8. Rio de Janeiro / Brazil. Thousands joined a student-led march in Rio on Wednesday against the prospect of a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency, three days after the far-right candidate topped the first round by about two million votes over President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, DW reported. Marchers carried signs reading “Brazil isn’t anyone’s backyard” and “Never again Bolsonaro.” “We’re fighting for Brazil, not for Lula,” 19-year-old student Talita Amaral told the Associated Press. Witnesses said the crowd was bigger and livelier than Lula’s own rally on the same street on Friday. Bolsonaro, son of jailed ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, is considered the favourite in the October 25 runoff.

9. Wellington / New Zealand. Greenhouse gases in New Zealand’s atmosphere are at record levels and the country faces more frequent and intense heatwaves and steep glacier loss, a government report released Wednesday found, The Guardian reported. Our Atmosphere and Climate 2026, from the environment ministry and Stats NZ, says the annual average temperature has risen 1.36C since records began in 1909, seven of the 10 warmest years came in the last decade, carbon dioxide is up 30% since monitoring began in 1972, and the country’s roughly 3,000 glaciers shrank from 56 to 30 cubic kilometres between 1997 and 2023. “The signal is just becoming clearer,” chief science adviser Dr Alison Collins said.

10. West Antarctic Peninsula / Antarctica. Penguin poop is fertilising green snow algae blooms along the Antarctic Peninsula and speeding up snowmelt, a study published Wednesday in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences found, AGU said. Researchers sampled red and green snow over five degrees of latitude and found far more phosphate — a key nutrient in guano — where algae were green. Red snow absorbs about 20% more energy from sunlight than clean snow; green snow about 40% more. “Without accounting for these biological darkening effects, we are likely underestimating how rapidly coastal snowpacks are melting,” said senior author Alia Khan of the University of Colorado Boulder.

Coming Up

Confirmed dates on The Watch: October 8, 9 and 12 — Nobel Prizes in literature, peace (Oslo) and economics. October 8 — New Zealand candidate nominations close at noon. October 12–18 — IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok, with G20 finance ministers there October 15. October 15–16 — European Council in Brussels.

Sources: BBC News; NATO; U.S. National Hurricane Center; The Guardian; Al Jazeera; Reuters (via The Straits Times); CBS News; Saudi General Authority of Civil Aviation (via Al Jazeera); DW; Associated Press (as cited by DW); Stats NZ / New Zealand environment ministry (via The Guardian); American Geophysical Union.

World Brief: October 7, 2026

Russia fired about 70 missiles at Ukraine overnight, killing at least 24 people on Vladimir Putin’s 74th birthday; Israelis gathered at dawn to mark three years since the October 7 Hamas attack; and a global bond sell-off pushed U.S. Treasury yields to their highest level since 2002. Ten stories as of Wednesday morning, October 7.

1. Pryluky / Ukraine. At least 24 people were killed in overnight Russian strikes across central and eastern Ukraine, 18 of them — four children among them — when a missile destroyed a five-storey apartment building in Pryluky in the Chernihiv region, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, as reported by BBC News. Zelensky called it one of Russia’s “most vile” attacks and a “birthday ‘gift’ to Putin,” said 70 missiles were fired in total and that air defences brought down only “some” of them. Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said 50 people were injured in Pryluky, seven of them children. Two more people were killed in Dnipro and Kremenchuk, two in Kyiv and two in Oleksandriya, and BBC Verify confirmed images of an unexploded Iskander missile lying in a Kyiv district. Zelensky said Ukraine had hit two oil facilities and a training ground in Russia’s Perm, Samara and Astrakhan regions, and that “there is also a response in the Black Sea”; Russia’s transport ministry said sea drones attacked a Liberian-flagged oil tanker off Sochi on Tuesday evening. Moscow has not commented on the overnight strikes. Separately, Bulgaria has called off the search for the missing crew of the cargo ship Alfa Watan, sunk by a drone on Tuesday.

2. Reim and Nir Oz / Israel. Israelis gathered Wednesday at intersections, bomb shelters and the Nova music festival site near Kibbutz Reim to mark three years since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack that killed about 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage, the Associated Press via NPR reported. Relatives hugged at 6:29 a.m., the minute the first rockets were fired, as explosions boomed in nearby Gaza. It is the first anniversary since all the hostages, living and dead, were returned. At Kibbutz Nir Oz, a mile from the Gaza border, 41 residents and foreign workers were killed and 76 people kidnapped; “That’s one out of four of us: murdered or kidnapped,” resident Dalit Ram Aharon told BBC News. Hamas issued a statement praising the attack. In Gaza, the territory’s health ministry says more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 1,460 since the October 10, 2025 ceasefire, and most residents live in tent camps. The anniversary comes ahead of an Israeli election at the end of the month that has deepened divisions over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war and his reluctance to open an official inquiry.

3. New York / United States. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield rose as high as 5.35% and the 30-year hit 5.73% on Wednesday, the highest for each since 2002, as a global bond sell-off picked up again, NBC News reported. Benchmark French and Italian yields were on pace for their biggest one-day jump since March, when the Iran war began, and Britain’s 30-year yield reached its highest since 1998. Europe’s Stoxx 600 fell 1% and Italy’s FTSE MIB nearly 2.5%; in early U.S. trading the S&P 500 was down 0.6%, a day after closing at a record, and Brent crude was above $102 a barrel. The 10-year yield has climbed 60 basis points since the end of July while U.S. crude has risen 20%, CNBC said, and traders are watching a $39 billion 10-year note auction and the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s September meeting, when it raised rates for the first time since 2023. IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva warned governments to get their debt under control urgently. “Policymakers had a relatively easy ride over the last 17 years, as for all that time interest rates were stuck below GDP growth rates,” she told Bloomberg Television. “Higher interest rates now put an end to that.”

4. Irkutsk / Russia. President Donald Trump said he will speak with Putin soon about the death of a 28-year-old lab worker at the Anti-Plague Institute in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. “So far we are in very deep discussions,” he said, adding he could report back “probably” on Thursday, BBC News reported. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said no call had been scheduled, said Russia’s reporting of the death to the WHO followed standard practice, and accused the media of spreading “false information.” Washington has sent Moscow a formal diplomatic request for more information; Peskov said he was not aware of it. Russian officials have not confirmed pneumonic plague and say there is no epidemic risk; the health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said more than 90% of the woman’s contacts had completed observation with no signs of infection. Neighbouring Mongolia has ordered health surveillance on its border, AFP reported, and Lithuania says it is ready to isolate and treat any case.

5. Gulf of Mexico / Mexico and United States. Tropical Storm Isaias formed early Wednesday in warm waters off eastern Mexico, about 285 miles (460km) west of Progreso, with 40mph winds, and the U.S. National Hurricane Center expects it to strengthen rapidly into a strong Category 2 hurricane before hitting the northern Gulf Coast later in the week, The Guardian reported with the Associated Press. Early projections put landfall somewhere between eastern Louisiana and the western Florida Panhandle, possibly near the Alabama–Florida line early Saturday, though the track is uncertain. “Residents from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle should closely monitor the latest forecast updates and ensure they have their hurricane plan in place,” the hurricane center said. Isaias would be the season’s first Atlantic hurricane; one has not formed this late since October 8, 1905, in a year when a strong El Niño has kept the Atlantic unusually quiet.

6. Goiânia / Brazil. Far-right frontrunner Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, who beat President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 80, in Sunday’s first round, vowed at a campaign event in Goiânia to use the far right’s much bigger presence in congress to change the constitution and “re-democratise this country,” The Guardian reported. Brazil returned to democracy in the 1980s after a 21-year military dictatorship that his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro — jailed last year for 27 years over a coup plot — has long praised. Leftwing congresswoman Talíria Petrone wrote on X: “This is the announcement of a coup.” Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party won the Senate’s largest caucus, 28 of 81 seats. Asked on Wednesday to clarify, he rejected speculation he wants to finish what his father started: “Let’s stop lying. Let’s touch down in the real world. Brazil needs to go back to normal, that’s all.” The runoff is October 25.

7. Kidal / Mali. Mali’s army, backed by Russia’s Africa Corps, has re-entered the northern town of Kidal after Tuareg separatists pulled out, DW reported. The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) said it carried out “a strategic and controlled withdrawal” without direct fighting, blaming the “disproportionate use of aerial assets” by the Russian forces. The FLA and the al-Qaeda-linked JNIM seized Kidal in April in a wave of attacks that also killed Mali’s defence minister. Beverly Ochieng of Control Risks told Reuters the recapture boosts the junta’s authority and army morale after recent setbacks, but is “symbolic” rather than “decisive.” Rights groups have accused the Malian army and its Russian allies of killing civilians during operations.

8. Stockholm / Sweden. France’s Henri B. Kagan of Université Paris-Sud and Japan’s Kenso Soai of Tokyo University of Science won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for explaining how “homochirality” — nature’s habit of building only one of a molecule’s two mirror-image forms — can arise on its own, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Kagan found a way in 1986 to push reactions toward one mirror image; Soai described the first potentially homochiral reaction in 1995 and in 2003 produced only one form, a feat “no one had previously achieved” other than life itself, the committee said, as reported by BBC News. The work matters for medicine, where the two forms of a drug can behave very differently, as in the thalidomide disaster. “This is one of the most exciting days of my life,” Soai told the press conference by phone. The pair share 12 million Swedish kronor. Literature is announced Thursday.

9. New Zealand and Melbourne / Australia. New Zealand police have opened their own investigation into the flydubai co-pilot accused of trying to hijack an Israel-bound flight with 182 people aboard on September 30, after confirming he did part of his flight training there, The Guardian reported. Assistant Commissioner Michael Johnson said Hamam al-Hammami, a 29-year-old Omani, spent 175 days in New Zealand on a student visa from November 2018 to May 2019 with a UK-based training company. Australian security agencies are already looking into the roughly two years he spent studying in Melbourne until 2017; RMIT University says he left without finishing his engineering degree. The UAE’s prosecutor general says he used a crash axe in the attack, in which the captain was struck mid-air before passengers and crew stopped him. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has called for a full investigation of his associations in Australia.

10. Zavodovski Island / Antarctic region. The chinstrap penguin colony on Zavodovski, a volcanic island in the South Sandwich Islands north of the Antarctic continent once hailed as the world’s largest penguin colony, has lost almost two-thirds of its breeding birds, a British Antarctic Survey study in Current Biology found, BBC News reported. Occupied chinstrap nests fell 63% between 2011, when the island held an estimated 600,000 chinstraps and 90,000 macaroni penguins, and 2025. Lead researcher Norman Ratcliffe blamed warming waters pushing the penguins’ krill south, while sea ice and a lack of islands stop the birds from following. Macaroni penguins, with a more flexible diet, have increased sharply, which Ratcliffe called the “biggest change in community composition ever observed at a single location in Antarctica.” The title of world’s largest colony now passes to Cape Adare in the Ross Sea.

Coming Up

Confirmed dates on The Watch: October 8, 9 and 12 — Nobel Prizes in literature, peace (Oslo) and economics. October 8 — New Zealand candidate nominations close at noon. October 12–18 — IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok. October 15–16 — European Council in Brussels.

Sources: BBC News; Associated Press; NPR; NBC News; CNBC; The Guardian; DW; Reuters (as cited by DW); AFP (as cited by BBC News); Office of the President of Ukraine; U.S. National Hurricane Center; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences / NobelPrize.org; New Zealand Police; British Antarctic Survey.

Former Bishop of Broome Christopher Saunders Jailed for Abusing Young Aboriginal Men: October 7, 2026

Christopher Saunders, the former Catholic bishop of Broome, was sentenced on Wednesday to six years and six months in prison for sexually abusing two young Aboriginal men, BBC News and The Guardian reported. He is one of the most senior Catholic leaders in the world to face sex abuse charges.

A Western Australian District Court jury found Saunders, 76, guilty in August of one count of sexual penetration without consent and 12 counts of indecent assault. His sentence was backdated to August, and he will be eligible for parole after four and a half years. He was acquitted of other charges, including alleged offences against a third young man.

Prosecutors said Saunders groomed the men by hosting alcohol-fuelled “shirts-off” gatherings at church-owned properties, often using church funds. “I was a toy that he was using,” one victim wrote in an impact statement. “I trusted him. I thought he wanted me to be a better person.” Judge Martin Flynn said Saunders had professed to be an advocate for young Aboriginal men but misused his authority and exploited their vulnerability.

The allegations first surfaced in 2020, when Saunders stepped aside; an initial police investigation was closed without charge, but police reopened the case after a Vatican-ordered inquiry. Perth Archbishop Timothy Costelloe apologized to the victims: “We are sorry that your trust was so directly and profoundly betrayed by a leader of the church.” Unless overturned on appeal, the conviction makes Saunders the highest-ranking Catholic in Australia convicted of sexual abuse during his time in the clergy, The Guardian said.

Sources: BBC News, The Guardian

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Sri Lanka Arrests Former First Lady Shiranthi Rajapaksa Over Children’s Hospital Charity Funds: October 7, 2026

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lankan anti-corruption authorities on Wednesday arrested former first lady Shiranthi Rajapaksa, wife of ex-President Mahinda Rajapaksa, over allegations that a charity linked to her misused donations raised for a children’s hospital, BBC News and AFP reported.

Investigators arrested the 73-year-old at the couple’s Colombo home. They are questioning her over 10 million rupees, about $30,300, collected by the Siriliya Saviya charity for a specialized scanner for Colombo’s Lady Ridgeway Children’s Hospital. Officials say such a scanner had already been donated by the Chinese government.

Rajapaksa denies wrongdoing and says the money was not misappropriated. Her husband’s spokesman, Manoj Gamage, said the funds are safe in Siriliya’s accounts. She returned Monday from medical treatment in Singapore and had petitioned a court to block her arrest, but the hearing was set for Oct. 12, the BBC reported.

Mahinda Rajapaksa was president from 2005 to 2015 and was hailed by supporters for ending the civil war with the Tamil Tigers in 2009. The family’s grip on politics collapsed in 2022, when an economic crisis toppled his brother Gotabaya. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s government has revived corruption probes into the family; the couple’s sons Namal and Yoshitha were both arrested earlier this year.

Sources: BBC News, AFP

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