Faced with mounting pressure over planet-heating pollution, Gulf Arab energy giants are turning to humble tech start-ups as they search for ways to remove emissions while keeping oil flowing.
Oil producers have for years touted capturing carbon before it goes into the atmosphere as a potential global warming solution, against criticism from climate experts who say it risks distracting from the urgent goal of slashing fossil fuel pollution.
The second-ever private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), organized by Axiom Space, blasted off from the southern US state of Florida Sunday, carrying the first two Saudi astronauts to travel to the orbiting laboratory.
Rayyanah Barnawi, a breast cancer researcher, is the first Saudi woman to voyage into space and is joined on the mission by fellow Saudi Ali Al-Qarni, a fighter pilot.
The Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2) crew took off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 5:37 pm (2137 GMT).
Israeli protesters thronged the heart of Tel Aviv Saturday for a 20th straight week, keeping up their campaign against the hard-right government's controversial judicial reform plans which they view as a threat to democracy.
Numbers had been down the previous week as Israel cities came under rocket fire during a five-day flare-up with Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.
Air strikes and artillery exchanges shook the Sudanese capital Saturday and armed men ransacked the Qatari embassy as the country's warring generals kept up their struggle for control.
Khartoum residents told AFP that heavy fighting raged despite repeated international calls for a humanitarian truce.
The area around the state television building in Khartoum's sister city Omdurman was one of the sites bombarded, witnesses said.
One man is revered in Western capitals for standing up to Russia's full-scale invasion of his country.
The other is widely reviled for atrocities committed against his own people in a war that has made him dependent on Moscow.
At the Arab League summit on Friday, host Saudi Arabia brought Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Syrian counterpart, Bashar al-Assad, to the same conference hall on the Red Sea coast –- a potent sign of the kingdom's global diplomatic ambitions.
The world's chemical weapons watchdog on Friday failed to agree a roadmap for the next five years because of deep divisions between Western powers, and Russia and Syria.
Member states of the Organisation for the Prohibition for Chemical Weapons (OPCW) meet every five years to assess progress on a 1997 agreement to rid the globe of toxic arms.
But the 193 countries could not nail down a deal after this week's meeting in The Hague, during which Moscow and its allies traded barbs with Western states.
Hundreds protested in rebel-held northern Syria on Friday against President Bashar al-Assad's participation in the Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia after a more than decade-long suspension, AFP correspondents reported.
Demonstrators in the town of Azaz chanted: "The people want the fall of the regime," rallying cry of the protests of 2011 that were bloodily suppressed by Assad's government triggering more than a decade of civil war.
Sudan's de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan sacked his deputy-turned-rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo Friday, as forces loyal to the feuding generals pressed on with fighting in both Khartoum and Darfur.
The United Nations meanwhile warned that humanitarian needs are increasing in Sudan, with aid chief Martin Griffith allocating $22 million in emergency funds to help Sudanese fleeing the violence.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused some Arab leaders of ignoring the horrors of Russia's invasion of his country during a speech Friday at an Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia.
"Unfortunately, there are some in the world and here, among you, who turn a blind eye to those cages and illegal annexations," Zelensky told Arab heads of state, urging them to "take an honest look" at the war.
Zelensky's surprise trip to the summit in the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah was his first to the Middle East since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
On a scorching sidewalk, Ibrahim Said hopes to withdraw his savings from a Sudanese bank, but the wait seems as unending as the war that has brought the country's financial system to a standstill.
Said is one of dozens of depositors who have queued at a branch of the Bank of Khartoum in Madani, a city about 160 kilometres (100 miles) southeast of the capital, to recover their savings.
"I have been here since seven in the morning hoping to withdraw money from my account," he told AFP.
