The fourth session of the Tunisia-EU Joint Parliamentary Committee is being held in Brussels on Nov. 5-6, with lawmakers from the Assembly of the Representatives of the People and the European Parliament adopting a joint declaration on migration, economic cooperation and modernising the 1995 association agreement. The sides also discussed recovering embezzled funds and Palestinian rights under international law.
Tunisia's health ministry blocked a payment due Nov. 3 to private pharmacies, hours after their union suspended the tiers payant scheme that lets insured patients get medicine without paying upfront. Pharmacists say the health fund CNAM owes them about 80 million dinars from 2025; the ministry says the freeze stands until the service resumes, the third such standoff since December.
Tunis's criminal court convicted the former head of the state tobacco and matches authority RNTA in absentia, finding he diverted cigarettes meant for official sale into unofficial channels, costing the state over 170,000 dinars. Four former employees received two to eight years each; five other defendants were acquitted, and all those convicted face a lifetime ban from public office.
Commerce minister Samir Abid told parliament the two countries are holding preliminary talks on a free-trade zone along their shared border, alongside separate deals on transit, auto parts and compliance certificates. Trade between the neighbours has grown 166 percent over five years to about 2.76 billion dollars.
Heat during flowering, hail in Kasserine and irrigation shortfalls in Tunisia's own Sahel region wiped out much of this season's tomato crop, and the commerce ministry admits the country currently has none in reserve. Farmers sell at 1 to 1.8 dinars a kilo while shoppers pay up to 6, a gap growers warned about in September that the ministry has yet to explain; tomato prices are the subject of the day's heaviest search traffic in Tunisia.
The First Lady met Russia's presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev and senior Ukrainian lawmaker David Arakhamia at the White House, urging both sides to build something more lasting on last week's six-day truce in Oleshky, during which nearly 800 civilians were evacuated. She presented letters to Putin and Zelenskyy and received Ukraine's Order of Princess Olga; further talks are set for Abu Dhabi on Nov. 10-11.
Updating a toll this paper put at four tankers on Thursday, Iran's Revolutionary Guard said a fifth tanker and a sea tug also caught fire overnight Wednesday into Thursday, again blaming naval mines; Britain's navy separately reported a tanker hit by projectiles off Qatar, with no claim of responsibility. Pentagon officials told the New York Times that US forces are positioned to resume major combat operations against Iran on President Trump's order.
Santiago Peña stepped down Thursday, hours before lawmakers were set to impeach him, after regulators seized Ueno Bank when corrected accounting showed its capital had fallen to half the legal minimum. Peña had held a stake in the bank's parent company; Vice President Pedro Alliana has taken over, with nearly 3 million Paraguayans, over 60 percent of adults, still unable to access their accounts.
Unions put turnout above 1.5 million and police near 600,000, as workers, students and the yellow vest movement protested President Macron's 2027 austerity budget. More than 70,000 police were deployed; the government has offered 4 billion euros for school renovation, far short of the 10 billion unions are demanding.
Eight of nine policymakers backed a quarter-point rise to counter inflation the Bank blames on fuel costs from the Iran war and bottlenecks in the Strait of Hormuz. It warned inflation could reach roughly 5 percent by mid-2027, up from 3.5 percent in September.
Five Poles and a Russian national are accused of running a smuggling ring from June 2023 to December 2025, moving shell casings and other munitions components worth over 455,000 euros across the border into Kaliningrad in vehicles with hidden compartments. Polish border guards intercepted several shipments during the operation.
A Helsinki court sentenced the Russian captain of the cargo ship Fitburg to three and a half years, and an Azerbaijani crew member to nearly three, for dragging the vessel's anchor across the Gulf of Finland seabed and severing two telecom cables linking Finland and Estonia. The ship, sailing from St Petersburg to Haifa, was detained on New Year's Eve when the damage was discovered.