Who says what · Cosmetic injections in Tunisia
On 23 July, Tunisia's aesthetic doctors' union handed parliament's health commission a draft law to criminalize cosmetic injections by anyone who is not a doctor, after months of warnings about disfiguring products bought online. On 17 August, the national chamber of beauty centres answered on Diwan FM: show us the files on the clients said to have been harmed, and stop accusing the whole trade. Where the union wants the question settled wholesale, by reserving the needle to doctors, the chamber wants it settled case by case, on proof. The ministry and the deputies each propose their own instrument.
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Tunisia
Staff and management-grade employees of the Compagnie des phosphates de Gafsa will stage a full strike on 1, 2 and 3 September if their demands are not met, according to a strike-notice telegram filed on Monday by the UGTT's department for public offices and enterprises. The demands cover immediate application of the minutes and agreements already signed, activation of promised wage rises, a higher end-of-service benefit in line with the Groupe chimique tunisien, a 4 percent increase in the compensatory allowance, and folding the 2015–2017 pay rises into base salary. The notice went to the industry and social affairs ministers, the government's secretary general, the labour inspectorate and the company's chief executive, after management and the supervisory authority left a union request for a working session unanswered, the union says.
Antonino Urru, 78, from Oristano in Sardinia, a former Italian army warrant officer with a past in the intelligence services, was found lifeless in his cell at Mornag prison on Friday 14 August, about ten days after being arrested in Tunisia on an international warrant following a final conviction for tax fraud of around 815,000 euros, La Nuova Sardegna reports. The death has been confirmed in diplomatic circles, according to the paper, but neither the Tunisian nor the Italian authorities have stated a cause. Tunisian outlets relayed the story on Monday.
President Kais Saied went on Monday to the Higher Council for Education and Teaching in Tunis as the institution formally began its duties, reviewed the state of its work and stressed its role in raising the performance of education, teaching, scientific research and vocational training. The council's composition was completed by a presidential decree of 12 August, published in the official gazette, naming the members of its high body and entrusting Mohamed Ali Boughdiri with the post of secretary general; the inaugural session was held on Monday 17 August. Afterwards Saied walked through the capital's Lafayette district, where he talked with passers-by about their daily concerns.
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Réalités · Monday, 17 August 2026
The word méduse is among what Tunisians are searching most on Google right now, in the middle of the beach season. According to La Presse, this is no new invasion but Rhizostoma pulmo, a species long present in Tunisian waters whose gatherings in the Gulf of Gabes were documented in a study built on 17 years of data. Environment and climate engineer Hamdi Hached points to a Mediterranean that in early August ran locally up to eight degrees above seasonal norms, to nutrient pollution from wastewater, and to fishing having removed many of the jellyfish's predators, while winds and currents pile the animals up along the shore.
Geopolitics
The sixty-day agreement signed on 17 June in Islamabad under Pakistani mediation expired on Monday without producing a final settlement. It effectively collapsed within a month, over vaguely worded commitments and the dispute about shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz: Trump declared it "over" as early as 7 July, and the Iranian foreign ministry's spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei says the United States' "gross and widespread violation" of the text meant negotiations never began. Nothing points to a revival; Pakistan keeps trying to restart direct contacts.
At an hourslong meeting on Monday, Donald Trump's envoy Jared Kushner and Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed, according to a source familiar with the talks, that a US general should lead the oversight of Hamas's "demilitarization". The meeting came a day after Kushner's rare talks in Cairo with a Hamas delegation, alongside the Board of Peace's Gaza envoy Nickolay Mladenov, in an attempt to salvage the board's fifteen-point roadmap after Israel rejected it. Placing the disarmament question under an American lead is the first concrete outcome of the mediation round.
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NBC News · Monday, 17 August 2026
Two explosives-laden Hadid-110 drones, launched from Iranian territory shortly after midnight into Monday, hit prime minister Masrour Barzani's private office and the residence of the head of the Parastin intelligence agency in the Pirmam district near Erbil, causing no casualties. Barzani calls the attacks "reckless and unacceptable" and "a dangerous escalation and a direct threat to the security and stability of the Kurdistan Region". Tehran accuses the region of hosting Israeli intelligence networks and Iranian-Kurdish opposition groups, and has repeatedly struck targets there since the war began in late February.
Europe
The EU's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas tells Die Welt she will put forward "the most far-reaching sanctions listings since the start of the war" this autumn: once adopted, she says, they would raise the number of sanctioned Russian entities by a third at a stroke. EU diplomats tell Reuters the bloc's diplomatic service will propose about 1,600 individuals and companies tied to the military-industrial complex, to be presented in early September and adopted in October; nearly 3,000 names are already listed. Kallas estimates the sanctions have so far deprived Russia's war machine of more than one trillion euros.
A court in Pskov on Monday sentenced Lev Shlosberg, one of the Yabloko party's senior figures, to eleven years and one month in prison for statements against the war in Ukraine, ahead of next month's parliamentary election. The same day Russia's Supreme Court rejected the party's appeal and upheld the decision barring Yabloko, the only party overtly opposing the war, from the vote of 18 to 20 September. The two rulings complete the removal of war opposition from Russian electoral politics.
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PBS News · Monday, 17 August 2026
Robert Jenrick, Reform UK's economics spokesperson, set out in a speech on Monday the plan that only British citizens should be entitled to benefits such as universal credit, child benefit, housing benefit and pension credit, with exceptions for military service and for those who have paid into the state pension system; the party claims a saving of 21 billion pounds a year by 2029. The proposal covers EU citizens with post-Brexit settled status and would require renegotiating the withdrawal agreement with Brussels. Labour answers that the vast majority of migrants have no access to the welfare system and that the plan would hit people who have worked and paid taxes for decades.
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Euronews · Monday, 17 August 2026
The European Commission wants to use electricity market legislation to tax electricity at a lower rate than natural gas, to make electrification financially attractive as part of the EU's target of 46 percent electrification by 2040; electricity today costs three to five times more than gas across the union. Germany's finance ministry objects that tax matters require unanimity and that the Commission is circumventing this by going through market rules: director general Bastian Fleig sees "significant doubts" that the proposal can be adopted by qualified majority and calls it a direct interference with national tax and budgetary sovereignty. Negotiations between the member states and the parliament begin after the summer break under the Irish presidency.
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Euronews · Monday, 17 August 2026