Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday confronted the tough task of uniting his deeply divided country after winning a historic runoff election to extend his two-decade rule to 2028.
Turkey's longest-serving leader surmounted a powerful opposition coalition, an economic crisis and anger following a devastating February earthquake to beat secular challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu in Sunday's vote.
Gunfire rang out Sunday in the Sudanese capital, adding to truce violations which United States and Saudi mediators said hindered the delivery of desperately needed aid.
Witnesses in Khartoum told AFP they could hear "shooting in the south of the city", on the sixth day of the one-week ceasefire which expires Monday night.
The truce aimed to allow humanitarian aid for civilians, delivered through secure corridors, but there were "violations by both parties that significantly impeded" those goals, according to the mediators.
Oman's Sultan Haitham bin Tarik, whose Gulf country has been a long-time mediator between Iran and the West, arrived in Tehran on Sunday for a two-day visit.
His trip comes just two days after Tehran freed Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele from almost 15 months in custody in exchange for diplomat Assadollah Assadi, who was held in Belgium over a 2018 plot to bomb an Iranian opposition rally outside Paris.
Oman helped facilitate the swap.
Oil-dependent Iraq has been warned its economy risks going into "intensive care" unless it diversifies in line with worldwide efforts to tackle the impact of fossil fuels on the climate.
The country's vast oil reserves are enough to produce crude at current rates for another century, but as the world works to wean itself off hydrocarbons, Baghdad has been slow to adapt.
For years the energy industry has faced calls to help meet the goal of keeping global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appealed for national unity Monday after winning a historic runoff election that extended two decades of his transformative but divisive rule until 2028.
The 69-year-old overcame Turkey's worst economic crisis in a generation and the most powerful opposition alliance to ever face his Islamic-rooted party on his way to his toughest election win.
Fantasy adventure "Brahmastra: Part One -- Shiva" won a series of prizes as the glitzy International Indian Film Academy Awards show started in Abu Dhabi on Saturday.
Star songstress Shreya Ghoshal won best female playback singer for her turn in the romance-laced epic, which also took awards for music direction and lyrics.
The show, studded with flashy dance numbers, is being held in the capital of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, a third of whose population is Indian, for the second year running.
Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv Saturday night for the 21st straight week against the hard-right government's controversial judicial reform plans, days after parliament approved the state budget.
Protesters gathered in other major cities, Haifa and Beersheba, as well as at dozens of junctions and locales throughout the country, to decry what they perceive as a threat to Israel's democracy.
The government's reform proposals would curtail the authority of the Supreme Court and give politicians greater powers over the selection of judges.
Sudan's army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has accused UN special envoy Volker Perthes of stoking a brutal conflict with paramilitaries, the latest in a series of apparent moves to bolster his war effort.
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said he was "shocked" by Burhan's letter, which requested "the nomination of a replacement" to Perthes and accused him of committing "fraud and disinformation" in facilitating a political process which broke down into six weeks of devastating urban warfare.
Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed two human and animal embalming workshops, as well as two tombs, discovered in the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo, the government said on Saturday.
The vast burial site, at the ancient Egyptian capital Memphis, is a UNESCO World Heritage site and home to more than a dozen pyramids, animal graves and old Coptic Christian monasteries.
Iraq on Saturday presented an ambitious plan to turn itself into a regional transportation hub by developing its road and rail infrastructure, linking Europe with the Middle East.
Once completed, the $17 billion project known as the "Route of Development" would span the length of the country, stretching 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) from the northern border with Turkey to the Gulf in the south.
