International News Bulletin — August 8, 2026

Politics

• Iran calls a Hormuz arrangement with Oman close but conditional – Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Saturday that an agreement with Oman on shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz was “very close”, while making a full reopening of the waterway dependent on Washington honouring commitments given in a June memorandum of understanding. Under the arrangement described by Iranian officials, inbound vessels would use a northern lane through Iranian waters and outbound traffic a southern lane in Omani waters, with an interim 60-day period under discussion. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said the reopening “has its own specific mechanism and has nothing to do with the negotiations between Iran and Oman”, and urged the United States not to interfere.
• Senate passes Russia and Iran sanctions bill by 86 to 11 – The Senate approved the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 on Friday in a bipartisan vote, targeting senior Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin, Russian banks, major energy projects and the shadow tanker fleet. The measure also authorises tariffs of up to 100 percent on the five largest purchasers of Russian crude oil and natural gas, a group that includes China and India. The bill now passes to the House of Representatives, which is in recess until September, and is not yet law.
• US rejects China’s nature reserve at Scarborough Shoal – The State Department said on Saturday that Beijing was using environmental arguments to advance territorial claims in the South China Sea, with spokesman Tommy Pigott saying Washington “rejects China’s ongoing attempts to enforce its destabilizing ‘national nature reserve’ at Scarborough Reef and deny Filipino fishermen access to their traditional fishing grounds”. The reef lies about 240 kilometres from the Philippine island of Luzon and hundreds of kilometres from the Chinese mainland. An arbitration panel in The Hague ruled in 2016 that China’s expansive claims in the waterway have no basis in international law, a finding Beijing rejects.
• Serbia and Ukraine aim to seal a free trade deal – President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ended a two-day visit to Serbia on Saturday, his first since taking office in 2019, with both sides pledging to conclude a long-stalled free trade agreement before the end of the year. Talks on the accord have run for more than two decades and have been blocked since 2005 by Ukrainian objections over agricultural quotas and tariffs, and the deal is a prerequisite for Serbia’s accession to the World Trade Organization and for its European Union bid. President Aleksandar Vučić said Serbia would support Ukraine’s EU candidacy and its territorial integrity, and pledged humanitarian, energy and infrastructure assistance for the coming winter.
• Venezuela’s government and opposition negotiate under US backing – Delegations from the government and from one faction of the opposition opened talks at the La Carlota air base in Caracas on Thursday and declared themselves in permanent session until 12 August, when they will assess whether to continue. Jorge Rodríguez, head of the National Assembly, leads the government side, while Dinorah Figuera leads a delegation drawn from the opposition-held assembly elected in 2015 that Washington still recognises; the opposition says the process should produce a new National Electoral Council by November and a restructured Supreme Court before the end of the year. Opposition leader María Corina Machado has been left out of the process and has said she was not consulted but will not obstruct it.

Economy

• Canada adds 75,000 jobs as unemployment falls to 6.4 percent – Statistics Canada reported on Friday that employment rose by 75,000 in July, a gain of 0.4 percent, and that the unemployment rate fell for a third consecutive month to 6.4 percent, its lowest level in two years. Wholesale and retail trade added 21,000 positions, finance, insurance and real estate 18,000 and construction 16,000, while public administration shed 15,000. Average hourly wages were 2.8 percent higher than a year earlier at 37.17 Canadian dollars, and Ontario accounted for 52,000 of the month’s gain.
• Washington sanctions three Iranian exchange houses and their front companies – The State Department announced on Friday that the Treasury had designated three Iranian foreign currency exchange houses and associated shell companies accused of moving hundreds of millions of dollars through the international financial system on Tehran’s behalf. The department described the networks as conduits for oil revenue and for sanctions evasion, and said the measure was the eighth action of 2026 aimed at Iran’s shadow banking apparatus. It presented the designations as consistent with the administration’s maximum pressure policy towards Tehran.
• Congo bans exports of copper and cobalt concentrates – An interministerial order signed on 29 June by the mines, foreign trade and economy ministers prohibits the export of copper and cobalt concentrates from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to a notice reported on Thursday. The ban applies immediately, while a new tax regime on by-products carries a three-month transition period and the mines minister may grant one-year export waivers in cases judged strategic. The country is the world’s largest producer of cobalt and its second-largest supplier of copper, and the order is intended to push more processing onshore.
• Brazilian deflation deepens as Mexican core inflation dips below 4 percent – Brazil’s IGP-DI wholesale price index fell 0.86 percent in July, extending an existing run of declines, while the country’s vehicle production rose 3.1 percent on the month. In Mexico, core consumer price inflation eased to 3.95 percent year on year, the first reading below 4 percent in months, and Chilean consumer prices rose 0.1 percent over the month. The releases point to easing price pressure across the region’s larger economies.

World News

• Wildfire forces about 20,000 people from their homes in British Columbia – The district of Summerland declared a state of emergency late on Friday as the Bald Range wildfire advanced, and evacuation orders on Saturday covered the whole community of some 12,000 residents along with about 8,000 people in and around Peachland, according to Canadian broadcasters. Premier David Eby said residents asked to leave should “go immediately” because “the conditions are changing extremely quickly”. Al Jazeera counted 39 evacuation orders and 49 alerts in force across the province, where about 1,500 firefighters are deployed alongside reinforcements from Mexico, Australia, France and New Zealand.
• Russian drones kill a boy and his grandparents near Kyiv – Five drones struck a house in the village of Pukhivka, in the Brovary district of the Kyiv region, at about 00:40 on Saturday, killing a three-year-old boy and his two grandparents and destroying the two-storey building, Ukrainian officials said. The boy’s parents were wounded and his 15-year-old brother was taken to intensive care with burns; Interfax-Ukraine and the Kyiv Independent put the toll from that strike at three, while CBC and UPI reported at least four people killed across the Kyiv region overnight. Ukrainian monitoring channels said drones hit oil refineries in Russia’s Samara region and Krasnodar territory during the same night.
• Yemen’s army says it struck Houthi positions on several fronts – The Yemeni armed forces announced on Saturday a multi-front operation against Houthi positions in the governorates of Marib and Hadramout, presented as a response to attacks by the group over the preceding days. Spokesman Colonel Majed al-Nuzaili said any targeting of government units would not go without a response and that aggression against one front would be treated as aggression against all. The government says a Houthi missile and drone assault on Friday killed 18 of its personnel, while separate strikes on displacement camps and residential districts in Marib killed two civilians and wounded 14.
• Israeli troops raise an earth barrier in a south Lebanon village – Lebanon’s National News Agency said Israeli forces entered Zawtar al-Gharbiya shortly after midnight on Saturday and built an earthen barrier near the village square, in an area handed to the Lebanese army under a framework agreement reached in June. The Lebanese military said three of its soldiers were wounded, one of them moderately, while dismantling unexploded ordnance in the same village. The army deployed to Zawtar al-Gharbiya on 21 July and about 50 families had since returned to their homes there.
• UN says more than eight million Sudanese children are out of school – Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told the Security Council on Friday that more than eight million school-age children in Sudan are not in class after more than 1,200 days of war, and said that “Sudan has already lost a generation to its earlier wars, and it is losing another one now”. About three-quarters of schools in Darfur have been damaged, destroyed or rendered unusable, and five of every six children there are out of school. The United Nations has documented more than 67 attacks on schools and 154 cases of schools used for military purposes since 2024, and says it has brought more than a million children back into some form of learning this year.

Bulletin automatically generated on August 8, 2026.