Parliament's Finance Committee and the National Council of Regions and Districts open joint hearings on Thursday on the 2027 finance bill, which this paper reported on 15 October plans state spending of 68.895 billion dinars against a 14.615-billion-dinar deficit. Thursday's session includes testimony from the finance minister, La Presse reported.
The Tunis Court of Appeal's specialised terrorism chamber this week raised several sentences in the case over the May 2023 attack on the Ghriba synagogue, in which a security agent shot a colleague and then opened fire near the synagogue. The attacker's fiancée and the person who rented him his flat had their sentences raised from 8 to 10 years in prison, a third defendant's sentence rose from 2 to 6 years, and a fourth person, acquitted at first instance, was now sentenced to 6 years.
Rachid Othmani and Souhail Chebbi, two of about fifteen people arrested after a 19 September demonstration in Tunis in support of detained Gaza-bound Soumoud flotilla activists, were sentenced in recent days to six months in prison each, suspended, according to the national committee defending those arrested; the committee said the ruling meant both were released the same day. Tunis courts have now sentenced seven of those arrested since early October: three convicted and freed in early October, two given suspended sentences on 14 October, and now Othmani and Chebbi. The committee is calling for charges against the rest to be dropped; several were placed in pre-trial detention in late September, according to the Tunisian League for Human Rights.
The Permanent Military Court of Tunis sentenced Olfa Hamdi, president of the Troisième République party, to a cumulative four years in prison and 80,000 dinars in fines across two separate cases, her lawyer Akram Moussa said. He said each case carried two years in prison and a 40,000-dinar fine, on charges that include conspiracy against state security along with other military offences. Moussa said Hamdi is already serving a two-year sentence from a similar case decided in March.
A drone strike on a market in Abyei, near the Sudan-South Sudan border, killed at least 150 people, Al Jazeera reported on Wednesday. No side has publicly claimed the strike; fighting between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has intensified over the past week, and Khartoum accuses the RSF of hiding in the disputed area. Abyei has been left without a settled status since a promised referendum on which country it would join was never held.
NATO announced on Tuesday that it is sending additional maritime patrol aircraft, radar systems, explosive-disposal teams and drones to the Black Sea, following a string of drone attacks on cargo vessels off Romania and Bulgaria. A Russian link is widely suspected but not officially established; at least two people have been killed and more than 20 sailors reported missing over the past ten days. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas called the attacks a “dangerous and unacceptable escalation”.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) said it laid mines on Monday that set fire to two oil tankers in the southern Strait of Hormuz, near the Omani coast, part of a wider campaign of tanker attacks in the strait since mid-October. Britain's maritime safety body UKMTO confirmed an incident involving only one vessel and reported no damage or casualties. An IRGC spokesman threatened to next target undersea cables in the strait and the Gulf, and the UN's shipping agency says about 6,000 seafarers have been stranded there since the war between Israel, the US and Iran began.
The UK Ministry of Defence announced on Tuesday that Typhoon fighter jets will fly purely defensive missions to protect Saudi cities and infrastructure from air attacks, without conducting offensive strikes against the Houthis. The move follows Houthi strikes on Riyadh's airport over three days in October that Saudi authorities said killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 300. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting called the attacks “an intolerable escalation”.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told the European Parliament that American negotiators have spent nearly two years trying to push Ukraine into a "surrender on Putin's terms", as a new round of peace talks opened in Oslo. She said Ukraine would have capitulated without Europe's continued support, and argued Europe needs its own seat at the table to balance increasingly Moscow-leaning US positions. Officials from the European Commission, NATO, Germany, France, the UK and Poland travelled to the Oslo talks.
The European Commission presented a revised Arctic strategy on Tuesday, led by Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, that puts security and resilience ahead of climate and economic goals for the first time. It proposes a maritime security hub to track Arctic shipping, more icebreakers, and a fibre-optic cable linking Greenland to Europe. Kallas cited rising Russian military activity, including drone incursions and cable sabotage, while several measures, among them the Greenland cable, aim to reduce dependence on the United States amid President Trump's repeated calls to take control of the Danish territory.
Poland's lower house, the Sejm, voted on Tuesday for two bills, one allowing abortion in cases of foetal abnormality and one decriminalising helping someone obtain an abortion. The first passed in full, 217 votes to 213, and the second with amendments, 233 to 203. President Karol Nawrocki has signalled he will block the liberalisation of the abortion law that the centrist government of Donald Tusk supports.