International News Bulletin — August 29, 2026

Politics

• Trump announces a US-Venezuela oil agreement – President Donald Trump said on Friday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had secured majority United States control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven Venezuelan oil reserves, at what he called no cost to the American taxpayer, describing it as the biggest oil deal in world history. Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez welcomed the arrangement, which Caracas says will bring about 209 billion dollars to the state treasury and more than 100 billion dollars of investment. Trump did not disclose the structure of the deal, the fields or the companies involved, and Reuters reported that it could face legal and constitutional challenges in Venezuela, where the state retains control of core oil industry activities.
• China removes two top generals from its military commission – State media Xinhua said on Friday that Zhang Youxia, vice-chairman of the state Central Military Commission and a Politburo member, and Liu Zhenli, a commission member and chief of the Joint Staff Department, had been removed after investigations into suspected serious violations of discipline and law. The two were the most senior officers still serving under President Xi Jinping on the body that commands the armed forces. Their removal leaves only two active members, including Xi himself, on a commission that formerly had seven.
• Norway’s King Harald V dies and his son becomes King Haakon VIII – The palace said the monarch died on Friday morning at the National Hospital in Oslo at the age of 89, after 35 years on the throne. Harald, Europe’s oldest reigning monarch, acceded in January 1991 on the death of his father Olav V and reigned through the country’s oil and gas boom. His son, Crown Prince Haakon, became King Haakon VIII automatically on his father’s death.
• Türkiye summons Ukraine’s ambassador over Black Sea ship attacks – The Turkish foreign ministry called in the envoy after the bulk carrier Lider Bordo Mavi was hit off Tuapse on 26 August, injuring five crew members, and a second Turkish vessel sent to tow it, the Lider Kocatepe, came under fire in the same area the following day. Ankara said it had stressed the absolute need to protect life, property, navigation and the environment in the Black Sea, after Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called earlier this month for a moratorium on attacks against commercial shipping. Turkish and Russian outlets attributed the attacks to Ukrainian drones; Kyiv had made no public claim of responsibility at the time of the summons.
• Russia test-fires a mobile intercontinental ballistic missile – The Defence Ministry said on Friday that the Strategic Missile Forces had carried out a combat training launch of a mobile, solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region. The missile flew more than 6,700 kilometres to the Kura range on the Kamchatka peninsula, and the ministry said the launch confirmed the system’s tactical, technical and flight characteristics and that all assigned tasks were completed. The ministry did not name the missile type; The Moscow Times noted that Plesetsk is Russia’s only military spaceport.

Economy

• Warsh’s first Jackson Hole speech lifts September rate-hike bets – Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh said on Friday that price data “do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved” and that policymakers “must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, we have work to do.” He described short-term interest rates as the predominant tool available against inflation and restated the 2 percent target as firm and fixed, citing the Fed’s preferred measure at 3.7 percent in July. Two-year Treasury yields rose from 4.22 to 4.30 percent, and market-implied odds of a rise at the 15 and 16 September meeting moved from about a third before the speech to between 50 and 57 percent depending on the measure.
• Wall Street slips on Friday but ends the week higher – United States markets were closed on Saturday, so the most recent session is Friday 28 August, when the S&P 500 fell 0.25 percent to 7,711.76 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 0.52 percent to 26,402.42. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was virtually unchanged, shedding 9.45 points or 0.02 percent to 53,559.99. All three indexes still finished the week with gains, with the declines concentrated in growth and technology names after Warsh’s remarks.
• Tokyo inflation edges up, supporting the case for a Bank of Japan rise – Consumer prices in the capital excluding fresh food rose 1.8 percent year on year in August, up from 1.7 percent in July and the third consecutive monthly increase, according to figures released on Friday. A narrower measure excluding both fresh food and energy eased to 1.9 percent from 2.0 percent. Bloomberg and the Japan Times reported that the reading strengthens the argument for a near-term interest rate rise, with the Tokyo index watched as a leading indicator of the national series.
• Asian markets end the week mixed as Brent slides – Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 0.41 percent on Friday to 66,405.56 and Taiwan’s Taiex gained 0.76 percent, while South Korea’s Kospi fell 1.79 percent to 6,788.88 and the CSI 300 in China lost 0.46 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was almost flat at 25,584.79. Brent crude traded around 89 dollars a barrel and was heading for a weekly loss of more than 5 percent, with traders citing the arrangements being negotiated for traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
• Colombia approves a 21.9 trillion peso cut to public spending – Finance Minister Miguel Gómez said the fiscal policy council had approved a cut and freeze of 21.9 trillion pesos in the 2026 budget, an adjustment of roughly 1.1 percent of gross domestic product intended to bring the primary deficit down from 4.4 to 3.3 percent of output. The government has filed a 2027 budget of 634.9 trillion pesos that incorporates a further 17 trillion pesos of austerity. Gómez said an economic rescue law deepening the adjustment would go to Congress in late September.

World News

• Russian strike on a depot near Kyiv kills at least 37 – A strike on a warehouse in the town of Myla, in the Bucha district west of the capital, set off waves of secondary explosions late on Friday; Ukrainian authorities raised the toll on Saturday from an initial 27 to at least 37, in one of the deadliest attacks of the year. Regional officials said 34 of the dead were residents of a care home for elderly and disabled people, and fire swept through at least 50 residential buildings as hundreds of people were evacuated. Prosecutors opened criminal proceedings after President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced “terrible negligence on the part of those who stored explosives right next to people”, while Russia’s Defence Ministry said it had hit a store of components and launch boosters for long-range drones.
• Nepal-Tibet flood toll passes 620 with thousands unaccounted for – Four days after a torrent of water, ice and debris swept through Himalayan valleys, Nepali police said they had recovered more than 616 bodies, with NBC News and UPI reporting a toll of 626 on Saturday; all counts remain preliminary. Estimates of the missing diverge sharply, from more than 2,400 in NBC’s account, including about 90 Americans, to more than 3,000 in UPI’s; China has separately reported seven dead and 554 missing in Tibet. Rescuers are still struggling to reach communities along the border where homes, bridges and roads were destroyed.
• Haitian gang frees 13 captives after the Kenscoff massacre – UNICEF said six children and seven women had been released, among them three children under the age of two, a seven-year-old and two teenage girls. More than 50 people were abducted during an attack late on Sunday on Kenscoff, a farming community in the hills above Port-au-Prince, in which at least 47 people were killed. A gang leader known as Izo 2 had threatened to execute all the hostages if police killed any of his men during operations to retake the area.
• Greenland inquiry finds forced contraception was not genocide – Expert reports presented on Friday concluded that Denmark’s campaign, under which at least 4,000 Greenlandic women and girls, some as young as 12, were fitted with intrauterine devices or given contraceptive injections between 1966 and 1991, often without consent or knowledge, breached their right to private and family life and in some cases amounted to degrading treatment. The experts found that the campaign did not meet the legal definition of genocide. Greenland said it would open a truth and reconciliation commission, and Denmark has approved compensation of 300,000 kroner for affected women, with applications open until September 2028.
• Israeli drone strike hits a Gaza hospital compound – A tent used as a medical supply store inside the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex in Deir el-Balah was struck on Saturday, injuring three people according to the hospital’s director, while the Israeli military said it had targeted a Hamas commander hiding in the compound and could not confirm whether he was killed. Al Jazeera reported four people killed across the territory in strikes that also hit Gaza City and Khan Younis; the health ministry, quoted by Arab News, put the toll from attacks outside the hospital at three. Médecins Sans Frontières said it was appalled and noted it was the second strike on the complex within a month; the health ministry says 1,313 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire took effect in October 2025.

Bulletin automatically generated on August 29, 2026.