Syria's Aleppo airport reopened on Friday, with the first civilian flight landing in more than 72 hours, after repairs following an Israeli air strike earlier this week.

Damage to the main runway in Tuesday's raid had put the airport -- the country's second-largest -- out of service, but the transport ministry said Friday repairs had been completed.

The first incoming flight, from Kuwait, landed at 8:30 pm local time (1730 GMT), according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

Despite transforming history as beasts of burden essential for transporting goods and people, the humble donkey has long been woefully understudied.

But scientists on Thursday took a big step towards clarifying the species' origins with a comprehensive genomic analysis of 238 ancient and modern donkeys, finding they were likely domesticated in a single event in eastern Africa some 7,000 years ago.

The paper, published in the journal Science, was the result of an international collaboration led by Evelyn Todd at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, France.

Beer-drinking will be "business as usual" at the Qatar World Cup, the tournament's chief insisted Thursday, despite severely restricted alcohol sales in the Muslim Gulf state.

Speaking 73 days from the first World Cup kicks off in an Arab nation, chief executive Nasser al-Khater said there was a "misconception" about alcohol sales, calling it one of the "unfair" criticisms faced by Qatar.

The price of accommodation and availability of beer have been among the main concerns raised by fans.

Russian airstrikes on Syria's last major rebel bastion in the northwestern province of Idlib killed seven people and wounded 15 on Thursday, a war monitoring group said.

At least four of those killed in the strikes that hit a stone quarry and a nearby home west of Idlib city were civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor that relies on an extensive network of sources on the ground.

The observatory said it was seeking to identify the other three casualties.

The Middle East is heating at nearly twice the global average, threatening potentially devastating impacts on its people and economies, a new climate study shows.

Barring swift policy changes, its more than 400 million people face extreme heatwaves, prolonged droughts and sea level rises, said the report released ahead of the UN's COP27 climate summit in Egypt later this year.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said two of their fighters were killed and six jihadists arrested Thursday following clashes in a volatile Syria camp where a security operation is underway.

"Two of our fighters have succumbed to their wounds following clashes" with Islamic State group militants in the Al-Hol camp overnight, the SDF said.

"Two women and five men masquerading as women," were involved in the attack on SDF fighters in the camp, the force said.

The ensuing fighting led to the killing of one jihadist and the arrest of six others, it added.

Cash-strapped Tunisia is facing a dearth of imported foodstuffs from dairy products to coffee, forcing informal rationing at supermarkets and threatening some food and beverage companies.

For weeks, consumers and businesses have been struggling to find essentials such as sugar, flour and cooking oil -- a crunch experts blame on the dire financial situation of the state which has a monopoly on many staples.

Radhia Kamoun, CEO of the patisserie chain Gourmandise, says she is struggling to source key ingredients, while those that are available have surged in price.

Iran dismissed as "baseless" Thursday a report from the UN nuclear watchdog that it was unable to certify the Iranian nuclear programme as "exclusively peaceful".

The finding by the International Atomic Energy Agency Wednesday complicated diplomatic efforts to revive a landmark 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major powers, including the United States.

Under the watchful eye of an instructor, Munira al-Rubaian spreads fresh bed linen in a mock hotel room in the Saudi capital, aiming to land a job in the desert kingdom's growing tourism sector.

The unemployed 25-year-old is one of thousands of Saudis enrolled in the state-run "Tourism Pioneers" programme, which aims to prepare 100,000 job-seekers for a field that government officials insist is set to take off.

A United Nations report published Thursday argues that an unprecedented array of crises, chiefly among them Covid-19, has set human progress back five years and fueled a global wave of uncertainty.

The UN Development Program (UNDP) announced that for the first time since it was created over 30 years ago, the Human Development Index -- a measure of countries' life expectancies, education levels, and standards of living -- has declined for two years straight, in 2020 and 2021.