The US and Saudi governments confirmed direct talks between the warring Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces would start in Jeddah on Saturday, even as fighting showed little signs of abating in the Sudanese capital.
A joint US-Saudi statement welcomed the "start of pre-negotiation talks" and urged sustained global support to quell fighting.
Lionel Messi on Friday apologised for going on an unauthorised trip to Saudi Arabia that led to Argentina's World Cup-winning captain being suspended by his club Paris Saint-Germain.
"I want to apologise obviously to my teammates and to the club," Messi said in a video posted on Instagram to his 458 million followers.
He was suspended by the Qatar-owned club after failing to turn up for training on Monday, a day after their 3-1 home defeat by Lorient in Ligue 1.
The Covid-19 pandemic, which killed millions of people and wreaked economic and social havoc, no longer constitutes a global health emergency, the WHO said Friday, warning that the threat remained.
It is "with great hope that I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency", World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
The extreme heat that engulfed the Iberian peninsula and parts of North Africa last week would have been "almost impossible without climate change", an international scientific study found on Friday.
The "exceptional early heatwave" involved "local temperatures up to 20 degrees hotter than normal and April records being broken by up to 6 degrees", said the report by the World Weather Attribution (WWA), whose scientists study the link between extreme weather events and climate change.
Years of sanctions on Iran have taken their toll, but on the strategically located island of Qeshm, people can still find goods from major global brands otherwise out of reach.
Off Iran's southern coast, some 150 kilometres (93 miles) from the United Arab Emirates' commercial hub of Dubai, Qeshm's merchants have been closely watching regional shifts since Tehran's landmark rapprochement with Saudi Arabia in March.
Britain's chief rabbi will join other faith leaders at Saturday's coronation of King Charles III but faces a unique problem -- how to ensure his attendance does not breach the Jewish Shabbat.
Ephraim Mirvis on Friday praised the "respectful, sensitive" way that King Charles's office had handled the situation -- even inviting him to spend the night with his wife Valerie at St James's Palace.
That will enable the chief rabbi to walk to the nearby Westminster Abbey on Saturday morning, rather than breaking Shabbat rules by using motorised transport.
Iran and Syria agreed to boost ties and develop economic relations, with a focus on reconstruction, as the Islamic republic's President Ebrahim Raisi on Friday concluded a landmark visit to Damascus.
Tehran has been a key ally to Damascus throughout Syria's long-running civil war, offering vital economic and military assistance that has helped the Syrian government claw back most of the territory it lost at the start of the conflict.
Air strikes and gunfire rocked Sudan's capital on Friday as fighting showed no sign of abating, even as the Sudanese army said it had sent a delegation for ceasefire talks in Saudi Arabia.
Hundreds have died in nearly three weeks of fighting between forces of Sudan's de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who leads the regular army, and his deputy turned rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Multiple truces have been agreed since the fighting erupted on April 15, but none has been respected.
President Joe Biden's national security advisor said on Thursday he will travel to Saudi Arabia at the weekend for talks with Saudi leaders as well as Indian and Emirati officials.
"This weekend I will be in Saudi Arabia for meetings with its leadership," Jake Sullivan said in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank in Washington.
The United Nations is short nearly $24 million needed to safely remove oil from an abandoned tanker off Yemen's coast, officials said Thursday, urging donors to stump up the remaining funds.
A virtual donor conference on Thursday raised $5.6 million in new contributions towards the $129 million unprecedented rescue operation, in which the UN purchased its own supertanker to remove more than a million barrels of oil from the beleaguered FSO Safer in the Red Sea.
