AfD win, Ukraine, glacier blankets and horse smuggling

Hi, I'm Kim Vannell in London. It's Monday, September 7th. Today. In Germany, the far right AFD wins a key state election. US envoys Whitcoff and Kushner push for peace and cuve. 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, 7 days a week. 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 and Holt, taking 44% of the vote. The one 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 Saxony and Holt is a particularly large state or because it will give the AFD enormous policy power, but because it will galvanise as a far right of 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 Merz will have to be even more focused in the coming months and years on domestic politics to try and win back support of his party which really collapsed in this election. So with him likely more focused on internal matters and French President Emmanuel Macron leaving the Elysée early next year ahead of an election that the far right National Rally might win, there may well be a vacuum in the year 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 support right now. It is coming under relentless Russian air strikes and is much more reliant on Europe than the US now for a lot of its financial and military needs. Now Berlin 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 envoy Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkoff are talking up new momentum after meeting President Vladimir Zelensky and 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 "new ideas" and hopes a new round of talks will be announced soon. Since the last peace talks in February, each side has intensified long-range air attacks deep inside the other's territory. Kiev resident Julia 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. What is producer Andrei Premiatchenko 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 replace you sleep, then you go to work. And still you hear air alerts, you hear explosions. The traffic is really bad. 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 air 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 will 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. 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 straightforward modes 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 Assister Podcast, MorningBid. detail cast a fuel particularly in the United States. Diesel prices hit their all-time high on Friday, 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 hospitalised, three are in critical condition. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. Now to Nepal, where 10 days after the devastating glacier collapsed, a 64-year-old woman is pulled from her collapsed home by rescuers. Chandiga Kumari Shrista had survived in a narrow pocket of air 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 Girong border crossing now a grizzly emblem of the devastation, it's where that incredible footage showed a wave of mud and debris enveloping buildings. Royces went to that spot to view rescue efforts and a trip organised by China's foreign ministry. Our reporter Nikoko Chan 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 worked day and night using excavators to clear a path forward inch by inch. The path officially reopened Wednesday, allowing more emergency personnel to apply as to reach this critical location. As glaciers across the Alps keep shrinking, researchers in Switzerland are turning to an unlikely material to help protect them, sheep's wool. The "Keep It Wall" project has spent the summer testing where the wool blankets can slow melting as effectively as the synthetic tarps often used on glaciers. "We can really constate that the front was very limited to the base." Project manager Timothy Steiner says the team is pleased with the results. After taking measurements throughout the summer, he says melting under the wool 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 scruum. "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 trail its 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 scruum infection may have taken hold. But obviously, any animal smuggled from Mexico to the United States would be operating outside the bounds of those difficult protocols, making it a greater risk for the screw or mouth rate. 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. 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