Daily Brief
2026-09-29
Top Story
Russia classified its fuel-export, refinery and exchange data by decree, calling it retaliation for ‘unfriendly’ US actions
A Russian presidential decree that took effect on signing removed export volumes, prices, routes, counterparties, refinery processing volumes and fuel exchange contracts from public view.
US emergency crude reserves fell to 283.8 million barrels, the lowest since 1982, leaving less cushion with Brent already at $107
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the emergency crude stockpile a US president can order sold into the market to blunt a price spike.
EU gas storage is at 71% against an 87% seasonal norm, and Germany at 57%, because the summer-to-winter price gap was too narrow to pay for filling it
Europe enters winter sixteen points below its normal storage level and Germany thirty points below.
Spain will decree a 15% cap on its regulated gas tariff, instead of the 45% rise due Oct. 1
Madrid will hold the increase in Spain's regulated gas tariff to 15% instead of the more than 45% scheduled for 1 October, and will freeze bottled butane at 19.55 euros a cylinder through June 2027.
Pakistan's government told an IMF review mission that Gulf fighting and Strait of Hormuz disruption cut its first-quarter revenue, without giving a figure
Islamabad's own briefing to the International Monetary Fund mission reviewing its loan programme blames a revenue shortfall and slower economic activity on the Gulf fighting and the disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
United States
Trump banned Canadian whey, spirits and motorcycles outright and put 50% tariffs on cheese, steel and furniture
From 12:01am on 29 September most Canadian alcohol, motorcycles, whey, molasses and non-alcoholic beer cannot enter the US at any price.
Around the World
China's prosecutors and currency regulator issued joint guidance on when a currency violation crosses from a regulatory fine into criminal prosecution
China's Supreme People's Procuratorate, the national prosecution service, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which polices cross-border money movement, jointly issued an eighteen-article guideline on when a currency case crosses between administrative penalty and criminal prosecution.
Germany's far-left Left party won Berlin's state election on a promise to expropriate more than 200,000 apartments
Die Linke, Germany's left-wing party, took about 25% of the Berlin vote, up from roughly 12% in 2023 and ahead of the Christian Democrats on about 18%.
Citrix NetScaler appliances are being exploited worldwide via two critical zero-day flaws that allow full remote takeover, CISA warned
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Britain's National Cyber Security Centre and its Dutch counterpart jointly warned that flaws in Citrix NetScaler appliances are under active exploitation worldwide.
ShinyHunters is extorting PeopleSoft customers who applied Oracle's emergency mitigation for CVE-2026-35273 but never installed the June patch
Mandiant, the incident-response firm brought in on the intrusions, found the extortion group ShinyHunters deploying web shells across dozens of Oracle PeopleSoft systems worldwide, in some cases taking full control of the operating system.
Germany plans to block Chinese state group COSCO from buying Zippel, a logistics firm at the port of Hamburg
A leaked internal government paper shows Berlin intends to stop COSCO, the Chinese state shipping and logistics conglomerate, from acquiring Zippel, a German logistics company operating at the port of Hamburg.
Kenya is taking bids on its Mrima Hill rare-earth deposit, valued at $62bn, with no feasibility study behind the figure
Kenyan opposition lawyer Ndegwa Njiru said on 27 September that the Ministry of Mining holds no economic viability report and no bankable feasibility study for the Mrima Hill rare-earth and niobium deposit, and the tender documents say the same thing, calling the invitation an expression of interest rather than a binding mining contract.