Six months ago this week, Mahsa Amini was arrested for allegedly flouting Iran's strict dress code for women. Within days she was dead, sparking the country's biggest protests in years.

The 22-year ethnic Kurd became a household name inside Iran, a rallying point for demands for change. Around the world, she became a hero for women's rights campaigners and a symbol for Western opponents of the Islamic republic.

Amini was visiting the capital Tehran with her brother and cousins when she was arrested as they were leaving a metro station in the city centre last September.

The UN was scrambling Tuesday to ensure a Ukrainian grain exports deal aimed to ease the global food crisis can continue, but its fate remained unclear days before the March 18 expiry date.

Talks between top Russian and United Nations officials in Geneva ended Monday with Moscow saying it would not oppose prolonging the so-called Black Sea Grain Initiative, as many had feared.

The Lebanese pound sank to a historic low against the dollar on the parallel market Tuesday, the latest sombre milestone in an economic meltdown that has plunged most of the population into poverty.

Officially pegged at 15,000 to the dollar, the pound was trading at 100,000 against the greenback, dealers said -- a dizzying plunge from 1,507 before the economic crisis hit in 2019.

The currency's market value was at around 60,000 to the dollar in late January.

Israel's parliament took another step Tuesday to push forward a legal reform package that has sparked mass protests against the hard-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Lawmakers in a 3:00 am (0100 GMT) vote approved a bill in first reading that would, among other things, allow the Knesset to scrap Supreme Court rulings with a simple majority vote.

Netanyahu's government has argued the reforms are needed to limit judicial overreach, but protesters have decried them as threatening Israel's liberal democracy by weakening key checks and balances.

Frozen in time for 20 years, two superyachts lie at the confluence of Iraq's Tigris and Euphrates rivers, bearing witness to the false glories of former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Just a few hundred metres separate the grandiose vessels on the Shatt al-Arab waterway in Iraq's southern city of Basra but, despite their proximity, they have met very different fates.

The Al-Mansur (Victorious) now lays on its side, having capsized after it was struck during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that ended Saddam's decades of iron-fisted rule.

Lawyers for Jair Bolsonaro say the former Brazilian president has agreed to hand over to authorities jewels gifted by Saudi Arabia and which entered the country without being declared to tax authorities, local media reported Monday.

Dozens of manta rays were laid out Monday on a beach in the blockaded Gaza Strip as local Palestinian fishermen celebrated the mass catch.

The rare fish flock to the Mediterranean waters off the coast of Gaza every year in March and April.

Fishing is a major commercial activity in Gaza, which has been under an Israeli-led blockade since 2007, when Islamist movement Hamas took over the territory.

Fisherman Bashir Shoueikh caught more than 10 of the rays, each weighing between 200 and 300 kg (440-660 pounds).

A Lebanese judge has asked central bank chief Riad Salameh to appear before visiting European investigators, a judicial official said Monday, part of a multinational probe into his personal wealth.

Salameh "has been summoned to appear at 10:00 am (0800 GMT) on Wednesday" before investigators from France, Luxembourg and Belgium, the Lebanese judicial official told AFP on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

Even as they highlight the historic nature of a shock rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, regional officials and analysts are injecting a note of caution into their assessments of what it all means.

The deal announced Friday, brokered by China, stands to end a seven-year rupture in diplomatic ties between the two heavyweights that has stoked unrest across the Middle East.

Tehran said on Monday it was prepared to take the new air of reconciliation even further -- by also mending fences with the tiny Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, a staunch ally of Riyadh.

Tunisia on Monday inaugurated a new parliament largely stripped of its powers, after a vote that saw a paltry turnout amid boycotts following President Kais Saied's July 2021 power grab.

The new assembly was elected in two rounds in December and January, with a voter turnout of just over 11 percent.

It held its first session at the legislature's traditional home in Bardo, a suburb of the capital Tunis.