Tunisia's Finance Ministry reports that the country paid 10.469 billion dinars in debt service in the first half of 2026, 45.4 percent of the full-year plan, of which 6.737 billion was principal and 3.733 billion interest. Tax revenue rose 2.4 percent year on year, but the primary surplus (excluding grants and confiscations) fell to 2.873 billion dinars from 5.075 billion a year earlier.
Tunisia's major projects commission reviewed plans on 8 October for a roughly 3,000-hectare port and logistics complex at Enfidha, with channels up to 19 metres deep, after the original 2019 schedule was missed. The project is inevitably compared with Morocco's Tanger Med, which handled over 11.1 million containers in 2025; financing and a timeline remain open questions.
Health Minister Mustapha Ferjani met South Korea's ambassador Lee Tae-won to explore cooperation on vaccine manufacturing, building on Tunisia's experience with the BCG vaccine, as well as technology transfer in biologics, robotic surgery and telemedicine. Ferjani has been invited to the World Biotechnology Summit in Seoul on 21 to 22 October; no agreement has been signed yet.
The National Union of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT) opened its seventh congress in Tunis on Saturday. Outgoing president Zied Dabbar said the union remains independent of every political side, and named four journalists currently jailed: Zied El-Heni, Mourad Zeghidi, Mohamed Yousfi and Borhen Bsaies. Bar association head Boubaker Bethabet pledged lawyers' support for journalists and announced a civil society meeting for 17 October.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions on the International Criminal Court itself, after earlier sanctions on more than a dozen judges and prosecutors; a six-month grace period exempts telecommunications, software and pensions. The foreign ministers of Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada and Japan said in a joint statement they "regret and strongly disagree" with the move.
South African jurist Navi Pillay, a former UN human rights chief and Nelson Mandela's defence lawyer, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work promoting peace and international law. She recently chaired the UN inquiry that concluded Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
A drone strike blamed on Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed at least 31 civilians and wounded 19 at a camp for displaced people in Blue Nile state, according to the Sudan Doctors Network, which called the strike a war crime. Four children were among the dead; the RSF had not commented at the time of publication.
EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič and China's Wang Wentao agreed, after four months of talks, to moderate Chinese hybrid and plug-in hybrid car exports to the EU and ease rare earth export licensing. The deal opens Chinese market access for EU exporters worth almost 4 billion euros, and EU leaders review the details at a Brussels summit next week.
Russian strikes killed 78 people and wounded 215 over two days in Ukraine, including 35 in Kramatorsk and four in Kyiv, where water and power were disrupted. President Zelenskyy accused Washington of being unwilling to help Ukraine, pointing to its parallel economic talks with Moscow, and urged the US to open Starlink for Ukraine and tighten sanctions on Russia.
After a group of 20 migrants used makeshift ladders to cross from Belarus on 5 October, with armed escorts according to Interior Minister Jānis Dombrava, Latvia's border guard has asked to be allowed to use force without a prior warning in some cases. The country has now finished its 173-kilometre fence against Belarus and is entering its fifth year of irregular migration.
August Hanning, 80, who led Germany's BND intelligence service from 1998 to 2005, remains in custody after prosecutors accused him of treason and espionage, saying he received about 2,000 secret documents from a former BND chief of staff for paid consulting work. Prosecutors have not named the country the material allegedly went to, but German media report it was not Russia.