Iranians staged new protests Tuesday to denounce the country's theocratic regime in defiance of a crackdown that has seen prominent figures arrested and some even face the death penalty.
Iran has been rocked by six weeks of protests of a scale and nature unprecedented since the 1979 Islamic revolution, sparked by the death in mid-September of Mahsa Amini who had been arrested by the Tehran morality police.
As Qatar busily prepares for the football World Cup, many residents' eyes this week are on its national team in padel, a tennis-like sport that has taken the country by storm.
Five years since it was introduced in the tiny Gulf nation, this doubles game is now its "fastest growing sport", said Mohammed Saadon Alkuwari.
He is playing for Qatar at this year's World Championship that began a short hop away in Dubai on Monday and finishes on Saturday.
Already mired in political and economic crises, Lebanon is now also without a president after Michel Aoun's mandate expired without a successor.
Cheered on by thousands of supporters, Aoun left the presidential palace on Sunday, a day before his term officially ended.
His six years at the helm were marred by mass protests, a painful economic downturn and an August 2020 mega-explosion of ammonium nitrate that killed more than 200 people and laid waste to swathes of the capital Beirut.
Iranians staged new protest actions to denounce the country's theocratic regime in defiance of a crackdown that is now seeing those arrested put on trial and facing the death penalty.
Iran has for the past six weeks been rocked by protests of a scale and nature unprecedented since the 1979 Islamic revolution, sparked by the death in September of Mahsa Amini who had been arrested by the Tehran morality police.
Unpaid wages dominate a growing number of complaints by migrant workers in Qatar, the UN labour agency said Tuesday, 19 days from the start of the football World Cup.
The International Labour Organization said worker complaints more than doubled in a year to 34,425 with the launch of a new online platform, in a report which called on Qatar to bolster the implementation of reforms launched after criticism of its rights record.
Saudi Aramco on Tuesday posted a 39-percent jump in third-quarter profits year on year boosted by higher oil prices resulting largely from Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The announcement came as the OPEC+ cartel of oil producers was set to implement production cuts that have drawn the ire of the United States, which says the move -- approved at a meeting last month -- amounts to "aligning with Russia" in the conflict.
Pope Francis will become the first pontiff in history to visit Bahrain, in a trip this week that is hoped will cement ties with Islam but is also marked by accusations of human rights abuses in the Gulf state.
The Thursday-to-Sunday visit -- the 39th international trip of Francis' papacy -- comes three years after his historic trip to the United Arab Emirates in 2019, where he signed a Muslim-Christian manifesto for peace.
Former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sealed his return to power Thursday, as the final vote count from elections this week gave him and his far-right allies a clear majority in parliament.
Results released by the electoral commission said that with 99 percent of votes counted, Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party had earned 32 seats in Israel's 120-seat parliament, the Knesset.
That combined with 18 for two ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties and 14 for the rising extreme-right alliance called Religious Zionism gave the bloc supporting Netanyahu 64 seats.
Algeria's president called Tuesday for Arab unity to face escalating "tensions and crises" as he opened the first Arab League summit since a string of normalisation deals with Israel divided the region.
Abdelmadjid Tebboune told the meeting's inaugural session that "our central and primary cause remains the Palestinian cause".
The Algerian president also warned that "exceptional global conditions are creating polarisation... which is impacting our food security", without directly mentioning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Israeli politicians made their final campaign pitches before the divided country on Tuesday holds its fifth election in less than four years, with hawkish ex-premier Benjamin Netanyahu eyeing a comeback.
The 73-year-old Likud party leader served as prime minister for longer than anyone in Israel's history before he was ousted in June 2021 by an ideologically-divided coalition forged by the current caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid.
