Jordan is gearing up for Crown Prince Hussein's wedding on Thursday, an event already greeted with fireworks, concerts and social media frenzy in the usually quiet desert kingdom.
The eldest son of King Abdullah II will marry Saudi fiancee Rajwa Al Saif at the grand royal wedding with regional monarchs, US First Lady Jill Biden and the king of the Netherlands among the guests.
Iraq's shrunken and conflict-scarred Christian community is launching a new television channel as part of efforts to save their dying language, spoken for more than 2,000 years.
Syriac, an ancient dialect of Aramaic, has traditionally been the language spoken by Christians in Iraq and neighbouring Syria, mostly in homes but also in some schools and during church services.
The United Nations said Tuesday it is ready to start salvage work on an oil tanker stranded off Yemen's coast with more than one million barrels of crude that pose an acute risk to the environment.
"We're very happy to be on site where we can start the work," David Gressly, the UN coordinator for Yemen, said by videoconference from aboard a support vessel that has arrived at the stricken ship, the FSO Safer.
An Iranian reporter detained since September after she exposed the case of Mahsa Amini that sparked nationwide protests Tuesday denied all charges against her as her trial on national security charges opened in Tehran, her husband said.
Niloufar Hamedi, 30, told the court "she had performed her work as a journalist within the framework of the law and did not take any action against Iran's security," her husband Mohammad Hossein Ajorlou wrote on Twitter.
In a Sudanese school turned makeshift hospital, a volunteer doctor hooks up a patient lying on a desk to an intravenous drip while nurses hand out medicines donated by neighbours.
As war has raged for six weeks and shuttered or destroyed many clinics, this school building in Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city across the Nile, has become an emergency healthcare centre.
A chalk message written on a blackboard outside says the volunteer-run field hospital provides free general medical care, minor operations and other services.
Fighting flared again in Sudan on Tuesday despite the latest ceasefire pledges of the two warring generals, meant to allow desperately needed aid to reach besieged civilians.
US and Saudi mediators said late Monday that the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had agreed to extend by five days the humanitarian truce they frequently violated over the past week.
Since the announcement, residents reported "clashes with various kinds of weapons in southern Khartoum", and fighting in Nyala, South Darfur's state capital.
Iran has "resolved" one of three cases raised by the UN watchdog as possible evidence it had not declared all its past nuclear activities, Iranian media reported Tuesday.
The reports came just days before the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency is due to meet to review progress in addressing the watchdog's remaining concerns.
Before Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan got locked into a brutal war with his former deputy, he was propelled to power by powerful Islamists -- a tide now turning against him, according to analysts.
Burhan "does not represent a political current in his own right. He's a chess piece in Sudanese politics," said Othman al-Mirghani, editor-in-chief of independent daily Al-Tayar.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday confronted the tough task of uniting his deeply divided country after winning a historic runoff election to extend his two-decade rule to 2028.
Turkey's longest-serving leader surmounted a powerful opposition coalition, an economic crisis and anger following a devastating February earthquake to beat secular challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu in Sunday's vote.
Gunfire rang out Sunday in the Sudanese capital, adding to truce violations which United States and Saudi mediators said hindered the delivery of desperately needed aid.
Witnesses in Khartoum told AFP they could hear "shooting in the south of the city", on the sixth day of the one-week ceasefire which expires Monday night.
The truce aimed to allow humanitarian aid for civilians, delivered through secure corridors, but there were "violations by both parties that significantly impeded" those goals, according to the mediators.
