More than 3,000 United States military personnel have arrived in the Red Sea aboard two warships, part of a beefed up response from Washington after tanker seizures by Iran, the US Navy said Monday.

The deployment adds to a growing US military buildup in tense Gulf waterways vital to the global oil trade and led Tehran on Monday to accuse the US of inflaming regional instability.

The US military says Iran has either seized or attempted to take control of nearly 20 internationally flagged ships in the region over the past two years.

Torrential rains have destroyed more than 450 homes in Sudan's north, state media reported Monday, validating concerns voiced by aid groups that the wet season would compound the war-torn country's woes.

Changing weather patterns saw Sudan's Northern State buffeted with heavy rain, causing damage to at least 464 houses, state-run SUNA news agency said.

It described the vast region bordering Egypt and Libya as "a desert area that rarely received rain in the past, but has been witnessing devastating rains for the past five years".

Five people including two policemen were killed and at least 11 others injured during the collapse of several buildings in Iran's capital, local media reported on Monday.

The policemen were securing the planned demolition on Sunday of "unauthorised buildings" in Tehran's southwest, ISNA news agency said. Another news agency, Tasnim, said two of the officers were killed.

The overall "toll from the collapse" has reached five, spokesman for Tehran's fire department, Jalal Maleki, told Fars news agency.

Oil firm Saudi Aramco on Monday announced profits of $30.08 billion for the second quarter, a sharp fall from the same period last year when prices surged after Russia invaded Ukraine.

The 38-percent year-on-year decline "mainly reflected the impact of lower crude oil prices and weakening refining and chemicals margins", the largely state-owned company said in a statement published on the Saudi stock exchange.

The decline followed a drop of 19.25 percent in first-quarter net profit.

Iran's foreign minister visited Japan on Monday for the first time since 2019, in a rare trip to a G7 member country by the Islamic republic's top diplomat.

The purpose of the visit by Hossein Amir-Abdollahian to the current chair of the G7 was not announced, but reports said Japan would press Iran to stop supplying Russia with arms.

Kyiv's military said last month it had destroyed dozens of Iran-built attack drones targeted at Ukraine's Odesa region.

Iraqi villager Omar Ziad gazes at the cracked and barren earth where his fish farm once stood, lost to water conservation efforts during a devastating four-year drought.

As the alarming water crisis blamed mostly on climate change drags on, officials see the need for trade-offs in an effort to meet the country's demands.

Drastic government measures have restricted water use for some purposes, including crop irrigation, and authorities have cracked down on illegal practices they long ignored.

Since late May, unauthorised fish farms like Ziad's have become a target.

Two years ago, Dubai's skyscraper-studded skyline welcomed a Ferris wheel touted as the world's largest, but it mysteriously stopped turning just months after opening.

The much-touted Ain Dubai (Dubai Eye) was designed as a tourist-luring landmark in the United Arab Emirates' glam-hub, which is home to the world's tallest building.

But now it stands idle for undisclosed reasons, its extravagant light fixtures the only parts seemingly still working.

"Ain Dubai remains closed until further notice," says an official website for the attraction.

Israeli forces on Sunday killed three Palestinian militants in the West Bank, the army said, the latest deaths in a surge of violence rocking the occupied territory.

An army statement said its forces "operated to prevent an immediate threat" and described one of the dead as a "leading military operative" from the Jenin refugee camp, a militant stronghold in the northern West Bank.

A minibus plunged into a ravine in Morocco on Sunday, killing all 24 people on board in one of the North African country's worst-ever road accidents, officials said.

The passengers were travelling a mountainous route to a weekly market in the town of Demnate, in the central province of Azilal, when the minibus overturned on a bend, the local authorities said.

Images on public broadcaster 2M showed the vehicle crushed at the bottom of the ravine.

At least 30 migrants are missing following two shipwrecks off the Italian island of Lampedusa, according to survivor testimony, as rescuers on Sunday winched to safety 34 others stranded on the rocks by rough seas.

Around 28 people were reported lost at sea by survivors on one boat, while three were reported missing from the second, after both went down in stormy weather on Saturday, said the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Both were rickety iron boats believed to have set off from Sfax in Tunisia on Thursday.