The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday announced it had transferred ownership of two antiquities to Yemen, but that the war-torn country had agreed to leave them in New York for safe-keeping.

Both pieces are stone sculptures -- a sandstone female figure and a marble mortar -- and date to the third millennium BCE from areas in modern-day Yemen, the Met said in a statement.

The museum said it had acquired the statue in 1998 from collector Jean-Luc Chalmin, who also donated the mortar in 1999.

Muslim leaders addressing the United Nations on Tuesday berated the West over burnings of the Koran, denouncing the acts protected as free speech as discriminatory.

Sweden has seen a series of burnings of the Islamic holy book, with the government voicing condemnation but saying it cannot stop acts protected under laws on free expression.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- who has put pressure for months on Sweden over its welcome to Kurdish activists Turkey sees as terrorists -- said that Western countries were seeing "a plague" of racism including Islamophobia.

UN aid for civilians on Tuesday entered rebel-held northwest Syria from Turkey via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, the first such convoy since a Security Council mechanism expired in July.

The convoy "consists of 17 trucks loaded with various relief materials from the United Nations", said Mazen Alloush, a border official on the rebel-held side.

An AFP correspondent saw trucks pass through the crossing bearing signs with the logo of the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Many of the most polluting countries are failing to cut carbon emissions from their energy sectors quickly enough to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a watchdog said on Tuesday.

The report comes days after the United Nations said the world was facing catastrophic climate change and was perilously far from meeting goals for slashing carbon pollution.

Slashing greenhouse gas emissions from the highly polluting power generation sector is vital to meet the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Grief etched into her face, 15-year-old Ibrar struggled to find the words to describe her pain at the loss of three friends in the huge flood that shattered her Libyan hometown.

"We will never forget that day in Derna," she said, while trying hard to remember how her father managed to save her along with her mother and five siblings.

In her hospital bed, she recounted the horrors of the disaster that killed thousands of people. "The number is huge," she said. "There were corpses on the ground. The cars were piled on top of the bodies."

Communications were severed Tuesday to the flood-hit Libyan city of Derna and journalists were asked to leave, a day after hundreds protested against authorities they blamed for the thousands of deaths.

A tsunami-sized flash flood broke through two ageing river dams upstream from the city on the night of September 10 and razed entire neighbourhoods, sweeping untold thousands into the Mediterranean Sea.

Iraq's President Abdel Latif Rashid condemned on Tuesday "repeated Turkish attacks", a day after a drone strike on a northern airfield killed three Kurdish counterterrorism officers.

"The Turkish ambassador will be called in to receive a letter of protest addressed to the Turkish president", Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Rashid's office said in a statement.

"Mercy be on the martyrs of Iraq, the civilian and military heroes killed by repeated Turkish attacks."

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will visit China from Thursday, his office said, his first trip to the allied country since before the Syrian civil war broke out more than 12 years ago.

China will be the third non-Arab country Assad visits during the conflict, which has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country's infrastructure and industry.

"In response to an official invitation" from Chinese President Xi Jinping, Assad and his wife "will visit China starting Thursday", the presidency said in a statement.

In the earthquake-hit mountains of Morocco, 13-year-old Abdessamad El Berd gets up before dawn to make the long trek to the tent city that is his new school, walking by torchlight and careful to avoid roaming dogs.

His father accompanies him on the 14-kilometre (nine-mile) walk from their remote village of Tinghar to the makeshift school set up in the small town of Asni, in the disaster-hit area south of Marrakech.

"I don't want him to drop out of school, but it's tough," said the 45-year-old father, Brahim El Berd.

Five Americans freed by Iran in a high-stakes prisoner swap landed back in the United States on Tuesday to a joyous reunion with family members.

The five arrived aboard an executive jet at a military airfield in Fort Belvoir southwest of Washington.

Relatives waved US flags and hugged the freed prisoners as they disembarked from the aircraft, then posed for a group photograph, grinning widely.

"Welcome home," National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan posted on X, formerly Twitter.