Tunisia
SONEDE resumes supply to the hillside district of Borj Erras in Mahdia from Saturday at one and a half to two hours a day, and says it will hold that rate for more than a week. The governorate services, quoted by TAP, put the unbroken outage at close to 20 days and blame not the region but national water capacity, the Sidi Abdelhamid desalination plant near Sousse that is still not in service, and tourism raising consumption while the region's quota stays fixed. The lawyer Mohamed Ali Mestiri wrote the same day of more than a month without water, which is a good deal longer than the official count. The LTDH and the Mahdia bar association said on Friday that an investigation had been opened citing conspiracy, article 72 of the penal code and article 24 of decree-law 54, against young people who protested peacefully and against people who filmed and relayed the protests.
The Coordination for Joint Action for Palestine in Tunisia says the Tunis court of appeal on Friday confirmed a seven-month prison sentence against Ghassen Boughdiri, and that it did so without hearing oral argument. According to the same statement he was prosecuted after taking part in peaceful demonstrations against businesses linked to the Israeli occupation and in boycott campaigns. The group calls the ruling political and demands his immediate and unconditional release and an end to proceedings against him and other activists for the Palestinian cause.
A restricted ministerial meeting chaired by head of government Sarra Zaâfrani Zenzri reviewed preparations for the 2026-2027 school year on Friday and allocated a further 67 million dinars to social assistance, meaning cash and in-kind aid to poor and low-income families facing back-to-school costs, plus free transport for the pupils concerned. The meeting also took up overcrowded classrooms, a more even distribution of pupils between schools, and the need to speed up construction and maintenance work. The government's own statement names regular drinking water supply to schools explicitly as a requirement before term starts.
Source:
Webdo · Friday, 14 August 2026
Algiers signed two contracts on 12 August under its integrated phosphate project: port infrastructure at Annaba with China Harbour Engineering Company, and the installations at Bled El Hadba in Tébessa and Oued Kebrit in Souk Ahras with Italy's Saipem. Using a fast track formula, Algeria aims to produce enriched phosphate in the first quarter of 2027 and fertiliser in the fourth quarter of the same year, on exploitable reserves put at 840 million tonnes and a target of 10.5 million tonnes of raw phosphate a year. Tunisia has the industry and the experience but, on the figures of the ministry of industry, mines and energy, produced 3.04 million tonnes in 2024 against about 8.2 million in 2010, and the government's target of 14 million tonnes by 2030 has yet to show up in the output.
Source:
Webdo · Thursday, 13 August 2026
The National Institute of Statistics puts unemployment at 14.9 percent in the second quarter of 2026, against 15 percent in the first, or 622,400 people out of work rather than 641,700. Over the same three months the number of people in work fell by 58,200 to 3,568,100, and the labour force shrank by 77,500, taking the activity rate down 1.2 points to 44.7 percent. Not every group improved. Unemployment among women rose 0.9 points to 21.6 percent, and among higher-education graduates it rose 2.4 points to 26.6 percent, reaching 35.6 percent for women graduates. Among 15 to 24-year-olds it fell to 35.4 percent from 37.5.
First estimates from the quarterly national accounts, published on Saturday by the National Institute of Statistics, put growth at 2.3 percent in the second quarter against the same quarter of 2025, and at 2.4 percent for the first half of the year. Agriculture added 5.5 percent in value and contributed 0.51 of a point, services added 1.9 percent and contributed 1.18 points, led by hotels, restaurants and cafés at 4.6 percent. Construction grew 3.6 percent and manufacturing 0.9 percent, but industry as a whole managed 0.3 percent. Energy, mining, water, sanitation and waste management fell 1.7 percent, on a 9.6 percent drop in mining and 1.1 percent in oil and gas extraction. Exports rose 10.4 percent and imports 11.2 percent, so external trade took 1.33 points off growth.
Geopolitics
Speaking to supporters in New York on Friday, the president said with a chuckle that after finishing off Iran the United States will pretty soon declare the Strait of Hormuz a territory of the United States. Since the war began on 28 February, Iran has restricted traffic through the strait, which before the war carried roughly a fifth of the world's oil supply, and control of the waterway is now the sticking point in ceasefire negotiations. A June memorandum of understanding required Iran to make its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, but each side accused the other of violations and fighting resumed by the end of that month.
According to a statement from his office on Friday, Nawaf Salam met the United States ambassador to Beirut Michel Issa and General Joseph Clearfield, who heads the US military coordination group for Lebanon, and stressed that Israel must stop destruction operations and set a clear timetable for withdrawal from Lebanese territory. Speaker Nabih Berri met the same US officials separately and said Israel had not stopped its violations and attacks, citing continued village demolitions, bulldozed farmland, forest fires and damage to heritage sites.
The interim government said on Friday that those released had been granted alternatives to incarceration under a Programme for Peace and Democratic Coexistence. The opposition movement Vente Venezuela says it independently verified 43 releases and the rights group Foro Penal at least 40, both well short of the official figure. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the releases a crucial step and wrote that 1,046 Venezuelans have been freed since the United States overthrew and detained Maduro on 3 January this year. The country is now governed by Maduro's former vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez.
Europe
Two Italian Eurofighters scrambled from Šiauliai in Lithuania and shot down a drone that had entered Latvian airspace, and two Turkish F-16s from Ämari in Estonia went up at the same time. All the aircraft were under NATO command and an investigation is running. Latvia's defence ministry wrote that the vehicle had entered the country as a result of Russian electromagnetic warfare, and this is the second such shootdown over Latvia after the first in June.
Source:
RTÉ · Friday, 14 August 2026
Montenegro and Albania are nearing membership, Ukraine and Moldova are taking their first definitive steps out of Moscow's orbit, and EU officials say more negotiating chapters have closed in the last six months than in the whole of the preceding decade. Iceland is meanwhile holding a referendum, with voting open until 29 August, on resuming its accession talks. The question now forcing itself on Brussels is geographical balance: Serbia's bid divides member states, and calls to keep the balance could tie Ukraine's progress to Belgrade's.
Source:
Euronews · Thursday, 13 August 2026
A monitoring plane run by SOS Méditerranée and the Humanitarian Pilots Initiative sighted eleven bodies in an advanced state of decomposition on Friday, around 57 nautical miles or 105 kilometres from the Libyan coastal city of Zuwarah. The Italian coast guard says it notified Libyan authorities because the bodies lay in Libya's search and rescue zone. The IOM said this week that 821 people died or went missing in the central Mediterranean in the first four months of the year, a rise of 111 percent on 2025, while arrivals on the same route fell 46 percent to 8,577.
Source:
Euronews · Friday, 14 August 2026