Middle East crisis live: Mojtaba Khamenei chosen as Iran’s new supreme leader; oil prices soar past $100 a barrel

 Iran has named hardliner Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s new supreme leader; Donald Trump says oil price spike ‘a small price to pay’ as markets tumble.

Iranian drone attack on Bahrain injures 32 – report

02:57

An Iranian drone attack that targeted the Bahrain island of Sitra overnight has wounded 32 civilians, the country’s health ministry is being quoted as saying.

The wounded were all Bahrain citizens and there were four serious cases, including children, the ministry said in a statement reported by the state news agency.

Rocket and drone attacks have targeted a US diplomatic facility near Baghdad international airport and been intercepted by defence systems, police sources are being quoted as saying.

More on this soon.

Who is Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei?

02:52

The man who has been chosen as the successor to Iran’s slain supreme leader is a 56-year-old cleric who has never held elected office or formally occupied a senior position in the Iranian government.

Mojtaba Khamenei has spent much of his life at the centre of Iranian power while mainly staying out of public view.

Khamenei is the second son of slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the clerical body responsible for selecting Iran’s highest authority announced the decision on Sunday, calling on Iranians to rally behind him and preserve national unity.

But Donald Trump had already said Khamenei would be an “unacceptable” choice, while Israel warned it would also pursue Iran’s next supreme leader.

Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969 in the north-eastern Iranian city of Mashhad and was raised within the political and clerical world that emerged after the 1979 revolution.

As the Guardian’s Lorenzo Tondo has also written:

As a young man he studied theology in the seminaries of Qom and reportedly took part in the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war.

Unlike many figures in Iran’s leadership, Khamenei never pursued elected office or a prominent government role. Instead, he gradually became an influential presence inside his father’s office, where he was widely seen as part of a small circle managing political access to the supreme leader.

Over the years he cultivated close relationships with conservative clerics and elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

His name surfaced publicly during the disputed 2009 presidential election, when reformist figures accused him of playing a role in supporting the security crackdown that followed mass protests. But he has never discussed the issue of succession publicly.

Australian share market plunges as oil price spike sparks global inflation fears

02:18Jonathan Barrett

Australian shares plunged on Monday, wiping about $13obn from the value of the ASX midway through the trading session, after a sharp rise in oil prices caused by the Middle East conflict sparked concerns of a breakout in global inflation.

The benchmark S&PASX 200 was down 4% in lunchtime trading to dive below the 8,500 point mark, marking the single biggest one-day drop since the announcement of Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs last year.