Sudanese security forces fired tear gas Thursday to disperse thousands of protesters calling for justice for scores of people killed since last year's military coup, which deepened the country's political crisis.
Some protesters flew flags and carried portraits of those killed in earlier crackdowns, while others waved a banner with the crossed out image of army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who led the military takeover last year.
Jailed British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah was "near" to death behind bars, his family told AFP Thursday after the first family visit since he ended a seven-month long hunger strike.
"When we saw him today, he was exhausted, weak and vulnerable," the activist's aunt novelist Ahdaf Soueif said. "He was very, very thin and sometimes leaned against the wall".
The pro-democracy blogger is currently serving a five-year sentence for "spreading false news" by sharing another user's Facebook post about police brutality.
Israel and Jordan agreed Thursday at a UN climate meeting in Egypt to clean up the polluted Jordan river, an essential waterway suffering under decades of pollution and drought.
The Memorandum of Understanding inked at the COP27 stresses the need to rehabilitate the river system which, experts say, has lost roughly half of its biodiversity.
Israel's environmental protection minister, Tamar Zandberg, called the pact "an expression of the close relationship... between the two countries".
UN chief Antonio Guterres urged rich and developing nations to stop the "finger pointing" at deadlocked climate talks on Thursday and reach a deal on covering the losses suffered by vulnerable countries battered by weather disasters.
With the two-week COP27 conference in Egypt officially due to wrap up on Friday, negotiators faced a long night as they scrambled to find a compromise over the contentious issue of "loss and damage" and prevent the talks from collapsing.
Over 1,000 people demonstrated in Tunisia's second city Sfax on Thursday amid an ongoing trash crisis exacerbated by a landfill fire polluting the city's air.
Rubbish has been piling up in the streets of Sfax for months, as available dump sites reach capacity with local residents forced to burn their own refuse.
Protestors, including refuse collectors, gathered in front of the provincial government headquarters chanting: "Sfax is forgotten, rubbish is eating it in every street".
The world is in danger of blasting past its goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, said climate champion Laurence Tubiana, slamming a "flagrant" lack of global leadership.
France's former climate ambassador was one of the key architects behind the Paris Agreement, which says global warming should be slashed to well below two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, and preferably the safer ambition of 1.5C.
Iran captain Alireza Jahanbakhsh said Thursday his team was focused on the competition at the World Cup and not on anti-government protests that have gripped his country.
Iranians have taken to the streets since September following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly flouting the strict dress code for women.
Jahanbakhsh, who used to play for Premier League club Brighton, was asked by a British journalist at a press conference in Doha if the team was able to concentrate on their opening World Cup match against England on Monday
The head of Binance, the world's top cryptocurrency exchange, pledged Thursday to release an audit into the firm and rejected claims he sparked the recent collapse of rival platform FTX.
Changpeng Zhao said an independent audit into Binance would be released "in a couple of weeks" and urged a full investigation into FTX's demise, before delivering a scathing critique of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, questioning his mental stability.
Russia's use of newly-produced landmines in Ukraine poses the greatest challenge to the landmark Mine Ban Treaty struck 25 years ago, a monitor said Thursday.
Moscow has developed new anti-personnel mines and used ones made as recently as 2021 in Ukraine, the Landmine Monitor said.
The monitor's annual report identified 277 civilian casualties of mines and explosives in Ukraine in the first nine months of 2022 -- a near fivefold rise on the 58 in 2021.
Hundreds of mourners poured onto the streets of an Iranian city Thursday, defying a lethal crackdown on protests over Mahsa Amini's death that shows signs of turning even bloodier.
Iran's foreign minister and media raised the spectre of civil war.
This week's protests coincide with the third anniversary of "Bloody Aban" -- or Bloody November -- when hundreds were killed in a crackdown on street violence that erupted over a shock overnight decision to hike fuel prices.
