The leaders of South Korea and Saudi Arabia agreed Thursday to boost ties in key sectors such as energy and defence, with the oil-rich kingdom signing a slew of deals including a $6.7 billion petrochemical agreement.
President Yoon Suk-yeol met with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the South Korean capital Thursday, with the pair announcing a plan to transform bilateral ties into a "strategic partnership".
For the past two decades, Bader Turkistani has criss-crossed the globe to cheer on the Saudi national football team, leading crowds in poetic chants that have made him a social media star.
This year's World Cup in neighbouring Qatar, by contrast, has the feel of a home game: Doha is a mere two-hour flight from his base in Jeddah, on the Red Sea coast.
The close proximity has Turkistani dreaming of a ferocious turnout by football-mad Saudis, the kind of support he says could help the Green Falcons break out of the group stage for the first time in nearly three decades.
It is 7:00 am in Dubai and as the sun peeks above high-rises, it reveals an animated scene below: about 200 people, mostly men, wielding bats and taped-up tennis balls in a weekly festival of street cricket.
About a dozen informal games are in progress in a carpark near the city's financial district, as metro trains glide across a bridge overhead and police watch from a parked SUV, wary of players bringing alcohol or otherwise misbehaving.
Showered with applause and chants of "Lula!", Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made a splash at a UN climate conference in Egypt Wednesday, his first foreign trip since his election.
Despite a mixed record on the environment and jail time in his resume, the 77-year-old leftist politician drew crowds curious to hear his promises to protect the Amazon rainforest.
"Brazil is back," Lula said repeatedly, words his supporters sang during his speech at the COP27 conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
A musical adaptation of "Monsoon Wedding" starting Thursday in Qatar had to remove alcohol and kissing, but the hit film's director Mira Nair insists it has not lost its "soul".
One of the biggest made-in-India international hits, the 2001 film recounts the chaotic preparations for the Delhi wedding of an Indian girl to an Indian-American man.
The musical version of "Monsoon Wedding" has already played in Berkeley, California.
A fierce defender of climate voices from the world's developing countries, Mitzi Jonelle Tan has brought her call for climate justice to the COP27 summit in Egypt.
It is the same fight she takes up daily in her native Philippines, where such activism can be dangerous work.
The 25-year-old sees first-hand the impacts of climate change on her homeland.
Iran issued a series of death sentences as women-led protests over Mahsa Amini's death in custody entered a third month Wednesday, with clashes reportedly claiming at least seven lives in two days.
That toll did not include six people authorities said were killed by gunmen who attacked protesters and police later Wednesday in the southwestern province of Khuzestan.
Street violence raged across Iran as protests sparked by the September 16 death of Amini intensified on the anniversary of a lethal 2019 crackdown.
Israel and the United States blamed Iran Wednesday after what they said was a drone strike against a tanker operated by an Israeli-owned firm carrying gas oil off the coast of Oman.
The Pacific Zircon was "hit by a projectile approximately 150 miles off the coast of Oman" on Tuesday, Singapore-based firm Eastern Pacific Shipping which operates the vessel said in a statement, adding that there were no reports of casualties or any leakage of the cargo.
Hundreds of thousands of people have flocked to Qatar in recent years to work on giant construction schemes as it boosted its infrastructure ahead of the World Cup.
Drawn by the prospect of making more money than they could ever hope to at home, migrants make up nearly 90 percent of Qatar's population of 2.8 million.
Most come from the Indian subcontinent and the Philippines. Others hail from African nations including Kenya and Uganda.
The Gulf state has faced harsh criticism over deaths, injuries, and unpaid wages of foreign labourers.
In the deserts of northern Qatar, children with a falcon perched on gloves on their left arms show off their hunting birds in a bid to preserve an age-old tradition.
These "Little Falconers" have gathered in a tent ahead of the football World Cup in the gas-rich Gulf emirate, in a bid to introduce visitors to a practice inherited from their forefathers.
"This is my first participation in the competition," says 11-year-old Breik al-Marri, dressed in flowing white robes beside his falcon Gasham, a leather hood obstructing the bird's view.
