Iran on Monday hanged two men on charges of spreading blasphemy on social media, prompting US condemnation and accusations from Amnesty International the Islamic republic has reached a "new low" in a spree of executions.
Sadrollah Fazeli Zare and Youssef Mehrdad, convicted of desecrating the Koran and insulting the Prophet Mohammed, were hanged in the morning in a prison in the central city of Arak, the judiciary's Mizan Online website said.
Air strikes again shook Sudan's capital Monday while the latest truce talks in Jeddah yielded no progress and a Saudi diplomat said both sides consider themselves "capable of winning the battle".
Sudan was thrown into deadly chaos when fighting broke out on April 15 between the forces of army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy turned rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who heads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Battles have since killed hundreds, wounded thousands and uprooted hundreds of thousands, leading to fears of security fallout beyond Sudan's borders.
Ceasefire talks in Saudi Arabia between Sudan's warring generals have yielded "no major progress" so far, a Saudi official told AFP on Monday, dampening hopes for a quick end to the fighting.
Sudan's army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy turned rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who heads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), sent representatives to the Red Sea coastal city of Jeddah on Saturday for meetings that Washington and Riyadh have described as "pre-negotiation talks".
As a young girl, Iraqi Kurd Shylan Kamal would help her mother knead bread until one day she realised the work was a way to build up muscles -- and she liked it.
Now 46 and herself a mother, Kamal sees her passion for bodybuilding as a matter of gender equality in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region.
"Having muscles is good for women too," she told AFP during a session at a gym in the provincial capital Arbil, where she spends four hours training every day.
"We can express our beauty through bodybuilding," Kamal said.
Israel's top court denied on Sunday a petition by a pro-settlement organisation to force authorities to demolish a Bedouin village in the occupied West Bank, capping years of legal battles.
The Khan al-Ahmar community, on a strategic highway east of Jerusalem, was slated for demolition in 2018 after a ruling that it was built without Israeli permits.
Right-wing Israeli group Regavim had taken the government to court in order to force officials to raze the village, whose 200 residents have drawn international support.
Israeli forces on Sunday demolished a Palestinian primary school in the occupied West Bank, citing safety issues and drawing sharp criticism from the European Union which had funded the project.
Palestinians hurled rocks at Israeli forces who fired tear gas at them as bulldozers moved in on the site at Jabbet al-Dhib village near Bethlehem.
The EU said it was "appalled" after Israeli forces arrived at dawn at the school site, which a Palestinian Authority official said served 45 students and consisted of five classrooms.
The Arab League on Sunday welcomed back Syria's government, ending a more than decade-long suspension and securing President Bashar al-Assad's return to the Arab fold after years of isolation.
In November 2011, the body suspended Damascus over its crackdown on peaceful protests, which had begun earlier that year and which spiralled into a war that has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions and battered the country's infrastructure and industry.
When a maternity hospital in the Sudanese capital came under bombardment, Esraa Hesbalrasoul snatched her premature twins from an incubator and rushed out in a panic.
In the chaos, only one of the infants survived.
Hesbalrasoul now tends to her baby in a small hospital in the capital's twin city of Omdurman that for weeks has struggled to weather the near-ceaseless fighting.
Numerous medical facilities have been shelled in the fighting that broke out on April 15 between rival generals and the forces they command.
An Iraqi court on Sunday sentenced to death a former policeman convicted of killing prominent academic Hisham al-Hashemi, whose murder in 2020 sparked condemnation in Iraq and abroad.
The sentence against Ahmed Hamdawi Oueid for killing Hashemi, an expert on Sunni extremism and a government security adviser, was handed down by a Baghdad criminal court and can be appealed, the judiciary said.
A well-respected academic and expert on jihadist groups, Hashemi was shot dead outside his Baghdad home in July 2020 by gunmen on motorcycles.
Exhausted by crackdowns in Turkey's Kurdish heartland, Ali is backing the main rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in elections next Sunday -- though his faith in the presidential hopeful is not great.
"It's time for a change," the 50-year-old told AFP in Diyarbakir, the Kurds' unofficial capital in southeast Turkey.
"For anyone watching TV in Turkey, Kurds are terrorists," said Ali, who declined to give his full name for fear of retribution.
