The United Arab Emirates is ready for soaring temperatures that are feared to make parts of the Gulf uninhabitable by the end of the century, the oil power's climate change minister told AFP.
Long experience of the harsh desert summers has taught the country to live with temperatures that regularly flirt with 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), she said.
Israel's president told Elon Musk on Monday that the tech mogul has "a huge role to play" to combat anti-Semitism, which his social media platform is accused of spreading.
The meeting came after the world's richest person visited a kibbutz community devastated in attacks by Hamas militants on October 7, and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence officials.
Musk has been criticised over what critics say is a proliferation of hate speech on X, formerly Twitter, since his takeover of the social media site in October 2022.
A four-year-old American girl is safely in Israel after being released Sunday from captivity in Gaza, US President Joe Biden said as he urged the pause in Israel-Hamas fighting be extended to allow for more hostage releases.
"She's free and she's in Israel now," Biden told reporters shortly after the Israeli army announced that 17 hostages were being freed by Hamas.
Israel faces mounting pressure to extend a four-day pause in its war against Hamas, but military officials fear that a longer truce risks blunting its efforts to rout the Islamist movement.
After hours of delay and acrimony that underscored the fragility of the truce, a second tranche of 13 Israeli hostages was freed on Saturday by Hamas in exchange for 39 Palestinian prisoners -- the same number as the previous day.
The truce between Israel and Hamas entered its final 24 hours Monday, with signs the militant group was willing to extend the pause after it freed more hostages, including a four-year-old girl orphaned by its attack.
Tearful reunions of families and hostages, released in exchange for dozens of Palestinian prisoners, have brought the first relief in the seven-week war.
Militant group Hamas raided Israel on October 7 in the worst attack in the country's history, prompting devastating Israeli bombardments of the Gaza Strip.
The United Nations on Saturday said 61 trucks carrying medical supplies, food and water had delivered their payloads in northern Gaza, as a pause in fighting allows aid to enter the besieged coastal territory.
Another 200 trucks had been dispatched to the Gaza Strip from Nitzana, Israel, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement, with 187 of them having made it past the border by the early evening local time.
Lebanese farmer and minibus driver Abdallah Abdallah went back to his village near the Israeli border on Saturday to find that weeks of bombing had badly damaged his house and destroyed his tractor.
"What can I say? Israel has always been criminal, it has always targeted our houses," said Abdallah, 50, his face weary as he pointed to gaping holes in the walls of his two-storey home in Aitarun, just across from an Israeli military position.
Rounding the corner of a hospital corridor, nine-year-old Ohad breaks into a run, hurling himself into the arms of his father after being held by militants in Gaza for nearly seven weeks.
The reunion took place at a hospital near Tel Aviv after the boy, his mother and his grandmother were freed along with 10 others on the first day of a four-day truce and hostage swap deal with Hamas that also saw dozens of Palestinian prisoners freed.
The UAE's Sultan Al Jaber, the president of the forthcoming UN climate conference in Dubai, is "cautiously optimistic" that the pivotal talks will be successful, he told AFP in an interview on Saturday.
Jaber, CEO of Emirati oil giant ADNOC, said he would hold "everyone" accountable for keeping within reach the target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting the rise in the Earth's average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
QUESTION: COP28 is due to start in Dubai in five days' time. How far are we from reaching a consensus?
Hamas on Saturday released a second group of Israeli and foreign civilians it had been holding hostage in the Gaza Strip in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, after an hours-long unexpected delay set nerves on edge.
Israeli authorities said 13 Israelis and four Thai citizens had returned to Israel.
The joint announcement by the Israeli military and the Shin Bet security service came after the prime minister's office said in a statement that the government "embraces the 17 hostages that are returning home, 13 of our citizens and 4 Thai citizens".
