International News Bulletin — August 27, 2026

Politics

• Qatar’s prime minister presses Iran on reopening Hormuz – Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani met Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, President Masoud Pezeshkian, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and security chief Mohsen Rezai in Tehran on Thursday, the first high-level Qatari visit since the war began on 28 February. The talks covered a proposed framework for a temporary shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz and a possible joint project to clear mines from the waterway, and Sheikh Mohammed said dialogue and diplomatic solutions “remain the optimal path for addressing disputes” while stressing respect for freedom of navigation. Rezai said the United States “must first take practical steps to fulfil Iran’s conditions” before the strait reopens, and President Donald Trump told Al Jazeera he was “not in a hurry” to resume negotiations.
• CIA chief’s Moscow trip carried a warning over the Baltics – The Wall Street Journal and Politico reported on Thursday that Director John Ratcliffe used his unannounced visit of 25 August to warn Russian officials against any attack on NATO members, naming Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and to press Moscow to cut its military and economic support for Iran. CNN and CNBC carried the same account, adding that US intelligence has assessed Russia could test the alliance with a cyberattack or a small-scale incursion. The Kremlin has said Ratcliffe met intelligence officials and did not see President Vladimir Putin, who was briefed afterwards.
• Iran bars UN inspectors from bombed nuclear sites – Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency would not be allowed into the facilities struck by US and Israeli forces until a protocol for inspecting sites damaged by military attack has been drafted, approved and communicated. He accused the agency of failing to condemn the strikes and of being used by Iran’s enemies as an intelligence-gathering tool. Tehran says routine safeguards inspections continue as normal at sites that were not targeted.
• Four EU states revive push to use frozen Russian assets – Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland have urged the European Commission to restart work on channelling more than 200 billion euros of immobilised Russian central bank assets into funding for Ukraine, according to the Financial Times. Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said “now is the time to start a new discussion about how we can make further use of Russia’s frozen assets for Ukraine’s, and our, benefit”, and that the 90 billion euro EU loan agreed in April “is clearly not enough”. Belgium blocked a comparable proposal in December, citing the risk of Russian legal retaliation and of turbulence in financial markets.
• Malaysia’s former prime minister charged with concealing assets – Ismail Sabri Yaakob, 66, pleaded not guilty at the Kuala Lumpur Sessions Court on Thursday to a charge of failing to give the anti-corruption agency a complete declaration of assets, put by prosecutors at about 40 million dollars held in nine currencies alongside gold and silver bars. He was released on 300,000 ringgit bail, about 74,500 dollars, and faces up to five years in prison and a fine of 100,000 ringgit if convicted. He is the third former Malaysian prime minister to face criminal charges after leaving office, having governed for 15 months from August 2021.

Economy

• Nvidia reports 96.2 billion dollars of quarterly revenue – The company said revenue for the quarter ended 26 July was up 18 percent on the previous quarter and 106 percent on a year earlier, with data centre revenue of 89.0 billion dollars, a rise of 117 percent year on year. Non-GAAP earnings came in at 2.22 dollars a share against analyst estimates of about 2.09 dollars, and the company guided to 108.0 billion dollars of revenue in the current quarter, plus or minus 2 percent. Chief executive Jensen Huang said “AI has reached its inflection point” and that “now, compute is revenue”, while CNBC reported he forecast roughly 70 percent revenue growth in fiscal 2028, an outlook finance chief Colette Kress described as supply-constrained.
• Wall Street closes higher as tech earnings lift the Nasdaq – The Nasdaq Composite ended Thursday up 1.57 percent at 26,541.35, the S&P 500 gained 0.72 percent to 7,730.99 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.20 percent to 53,569.44, according to Yahoo Finance’s closing tally. Salesforce rose 11.2 percent and CrowdStrike 9 percent after their own results, and Nvidia traded about 7 percent higher before the opening bell. October West Texas Intermediate crude was quoted at 83.66 dollars a barrel, up 1.74 percent, with the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium still ahead.
• Bank of Korea raises its policy rate to 3 percent – The board lifted the base rate by 25 basis points on Thursday in a second consecutive increase, with six of its seven members in favour, citing inflation above target and financial-stability risks. It raised its 2026 growth forecast to 3.3 percent from the 2.6 percent projected in May, pointing to income gains from the semiconductor boom. Reuters said 18 of 35 economists it surveyed had expected the move, and a majority of board members see the rate at 3.25 percent in six months.
• Ukrainian drone strike shuts Russia’s fourth-largest refinery – NORSI, Lukoil’s plant in the Nizhny Novgorod region and Russia’s second-largest gasoline producer, suspended crude processing after a drone attack on Wednesday, Reuters reported, with damage to the CDU-5 primary unit that handles 12,000 tonnes a day, about a quarter of the site’s capacity. Regional governor Gleb Nikitin confirmed that an industrial facility had been damaged. Ukrainian outlets said the halt leaves all of Lukoil’s main Russian refineries offline and is the plant’s fifth drone-related shutdown in under five months; industry sources could not say how long repairs would take.
• US prosecutors move to revive maritime prize courts – The Justice Department is preparing to activate a Civil War-era body of maritime law to speed the seizure of Iranian oil tankers and their cargo as US property, Bloomberg reported, in plans coordinated with the Pentagon and not yet finalised. Aaron Reitz, the US attorney in Houston whose office is working with department headquarters, said prize courts were an “ancient body of maritime law” that the department is “now reviving”. US forces have intercepted several Iranian-owned or linked ships since the blockade began in April, and an existing civil forfeiture case over a Venezuelan supertanker has been slowed by third-party claims.

World News

• Himalayan flood toll passes 360 with about 1,400 missing – Nepali authorities have recovered 359 bodies and Chinese officials three after Wednesday’s collapse of glacial rock and ice sent a debris-laden surge down the Lhende river, roughly 20 kilometres northeast of the Rasuwagadhi border crossing. Al Jazeera reported 910 people missing in Nepal, more than 500 of them foreigners, and Chinese state broadcaster CCTV put the number missing in Tibet’s Gyirong county at 558, including 260 foreign nationals; Democracy Now reported a combined total above 1,300 earlier in the day and the counts remain preliminary. At least 19 bridges and about 40 kilometres of road have been destroyed, and the US Geological Survey said the seismic signal recorded at the time came from the collapse itself rather than from an earthquake.
• Ratko Mladic dies in United Nations custody at 84 – The former Bosnian Serb military commander, serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, died in a United Nations detention hospital in The Hague, NPR and CBS News reported on Thursday. Forces under his command killed more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, the only episode in Europe since the Second World War that international courts have recognised as genocide. He spent years as a fugitive before his arrest in Serbia in 2011, and the Bosnian war of the 1990s killed more than 100,000 people.
• Wildfires kill 12 in northern Algeria during a heatwave – Five people died in Jijel province, four in Bejaia and three in Tizi Ouzou on Wednesday, the interior minister and civil protection authorities said, and 54 others were treated for burns at a hospital in Bejaia, six of them in a serious condition. Civil protection recorded 154 fire outbreaks across the country that day, 36 of them in Bejaia, of which 18 had been brought under control; some outlets reported 159 fires across 16 provinces. Residents were evacuated in Bejaia and Jijel as a severe heatwave extended across Algeria and neighbouring Tunisia.
• Nigerian kidnappers collected 5.8 million dollars in ransoms – The consultancy SBM Intelligence said 7.78 billion naira was paid to free abducted people between July 2025 and June 2026, more than three times the previous year’s total, with 7,825 people kidnapped, an increase of 66 percent. A faction of Boko Haram took 90 percent of the recorded ransom money, largely through two mass abductions that each seized more than 300 people, although the northwest recorded more incidents overall. Analyst Kehinde Giwa told the Associated Press that “for every ransom that is paid for a kidnapping incident, you are simply birthing another kidnapping incident”.
• US strikes on alleged drug boats pass 227 deaths – Southern Command said a strike on an alleged smuggling vessel in the Caribbean killed four people, taking the toll of a campaign that began almost a year ago to at least 227 people in 68 strikes, according to the Associated Press. The command said “confirmed intelligence” showed the boat was actively involved in narcotrafficking, but released no evidence beyond a seven-second video of a moving boat. Amnesty International has described the strikes as extrajudicial killings and as crimes under international law.

Bulletin automatically generated on August 27, 2026.