Tunisia
Several hundred people marched from the journalists' union headquarters through central Tunis on Saturday demanding the release of four flotilla organisers held at Mornaguia prison over alleged money-laundering linked to their Gaza aid campaign, in a march called by the UGTT union, the bar association ONAT and the Human Rights League. Organiser Wael Naouar has been on hunger strike for over a month and has lost 21 kilograms, while three co-detainees have refused food for more than a week; human rights lawyer Ayachi Hammami joined with his own solidarity hunger strike.
The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights recorded 1,093 protest actions in August, more than triple the same month last year, with its social observatory saying access to water and electricity topped the list of grievances for the first time, at 42 percent of all actions. Civil and political rights, driven largely by prison conditions and detainee deaths, followed close behind at 39 percent, while labour and employment protests fell by more than a third from July.
As Thursday's storm hit Greater Tunis, the Tunis governorate announced at 14:53 that all schools would dismiss at 15:00, and parents converged on schools at once as roads flooded. A published commentary in La Presse argued the National Meteorological Institute's forecasts had been available up to a day in advance and faulted officials for waiting until the last minute to warn parents.
Geopolitics
Yemen's Houthi movement, which calls itself Ansar Allah, fired a ballistic missile toward Riyadh before dawn on Saturday; a Saudi-led coalition spokesman said it was intercepted, and no casualties or damage were reported. It was the first air-raid alert sounded in the Saudi capital itself since the current round of fighting escalated in July, though the Houthis also attempted strikes on four other Saudi cities that were intercepted.
Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said Tehran has passed Washington three conditions to end the war through Qatari mediation: a halt to fighting on all fronts, release of frozen Iranian funds, and an end to the US naval blockade. He said Iran is awaiting a response from President Trump, but also warned Iran is prepared for what he called a decisive war and said it had recently test-fired a new multi-warhead anti-ship missile near a US vessel.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer are set to meet Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng in New York on 20 September, the final scheduled session before Trump hosts Xi Jinping at the White House on 24 September. The US Trade Representative's office said the talks will cover trade, rare earths and artificial intelligence, and will check on implementation of earlier commitments.
Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, said crude, cargo and LNG shipments through the Strait of Hormuz over the past two weeks were the highest in six months, and that Gulf allies have moved more than a billion barrels of crude through the strait under US naval protection in the past two months. Cooper said Iran has exported no oil at all under what he called an ironclad blockade, a claim that goes further than the US Navy's own account two days earlier, an account independent ship-tracking data had already questioned.
Europe
NATO's chiefs of defence, meeting in Copenhagen, elected German General Carsten Breuer to chair the alliance's senior military advisory body from July 2027, choosing him over Canada's General Jennie Carignan. Breuer becomes chief military adviser to Secretary-General Mark Rutte, giving Germany one of NATO's two most senior military posts alongside the Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
Source:
Euronews · Saturday, 19 September 2026
Aramco told European customers under long-term contracts they will receive no crude oil in October, after a drone attack, which Saudi Arabia says was launched from Iraq, knocked out the East-West pipeline, the same line already damaged in an earlier drone attack, feeding the Red Sea port of Yanbu. The outage removes four to five percent of global export capacity; Aramco expects a partial restart within days and full capacity within six weeks, and is using ship-to-ship transfers off Oman to soften the gap.
Source:
Meduza · Friday, 18 September 2026
Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced Poland has joined the Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition, founded in Paris in July by Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine and the UK, which is developing a Ukrainian-designed system called Freyja as a cheaper complement to Patriot batteries. Tusk called Poland's earlier absence a misunderstanding and said Warsaw has prepared a new, undisclosed military aid package for Ukraine.
Germany will cut the tax on petrol and diesel by about seventeen cents a litre from October to the end of the year, and is separately preparing the country's first fuel price cap, tied to the oil price, after pump prices hit a record 2.286 euros a litre this week. The tax cut lands on the same day, Sunday 20 September, that the states of Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern hold elections, where Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU is expected to lose ground to the AfD.
Source:
France 24 · Saturday, 19 September 2026