A Brazilian court ruled Wednesday ex-president Jair Bolsonaro has five days to hand over pricey jewelry he received as a present from Saudi Arabia, and ordered an audit of all official gifts during his presidency.

The Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), which oversees the government coffers, also ordered the far-right ex-army captain to hand over to the presidential palace collection two guns he received as presents from the United Arab Emirates in 2019.

Saudi Arabia's new national airline plans more aircraft orders as it prepares to operate its first flights in early 2025, its CEO told AFP on Wednesday.

The carrier, Riyadh Air, was officially unveiled on Sunday, and on Tuesday announced an agreement to purchase 39 Boeing Dreamliners, with options for 33 more jets.

Those acquisitions are part of a bigger deal -- which could reach as many as 121 planes with options -- that also involves the kingdom's other national carrier, Jeddah-based Saudia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday was hosting Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad for talks as the Kremlin seeks to mend ties between Damascus and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The meeting follows the surprise announcement last week of a Chinese-brokered restoration of diplomatic ties between the Middle East's major rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Ties between Erdogan and Assad were severed after the outbreak of fighting in Syria and successful Kremlin mediation would give Putin diplomatic clout with Russia isolated internationally over the Ukraine conflict.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping approached Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler last year about Beijing serving as a "bridge" between the kingdom and Iran, jump-starting talks that yielded last week's surprise rapprochement, a Saudi official said Wednesday.

The initial conversation between Xi and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took place during bilateral talks at a summit in Riyadh in December, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe how the deal -- whose ripple effects could spread across the Middle East -- took shape.

Thousands of Syrians demonstrated in the war-ravaged country's rebel-held northwest on Wednesday, marking 12 years since the start of pro-democracy protests and rejecting any international "normalisation" with Damascus.

The brutal repression of the 2011 protests, which began during the Middle East's Arab Spring uprisings, triggered a complex civil war that drew in foreign powers and jihadists.

It has claimed more than 500,000 lives and left millions displaced internally and abroad.

The German government is under pressure for hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was due to arrive in Berlin later Wednesday and facing strong criticism over planned legal reforms.

On the eve of Netanyahu's departure for Germany and ahead of a planned trip to Britain, 1,000 writers, artists and academics wrote to the two European nations' ambassadors urging their governments to scrap the visits.

The pain wells up inside Naki Bega as she remembers being herded onto a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi's most notorious extermination camp.

They "threw us into (cattle) wagons with a very small window, no water, no food. About 13 days later we arrived in Birkenau," said the 95-year-old, one of Greece's last Holocaust survivors.

The country marks the 80th anniversary of the first deportations of thousands of Greek Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau on Wednesday, a traumatic event that devastated a once-flourishing community whose roots go back to antiquity.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping approached Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler last year about Beijing serving as a "bridge" between the kingdom and Iran, jump-starting talks that yielded last week's surprise rapprochement, a Saudi official said Wednesday.

The initial conversation between Xi and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took place during bilateral talks at a summit in Riyadh in December, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe how the deal -- whose ripple effects could spread across the Middle East -- took shape.

Lebanon's under-fire central bank governor Riad Salameh failed to appear Wednesday before European investigators, with his legal team claiming the hearing would have been "in conflict with national sovereignty", a judicial source said.

Salameh, 72, is part of the Lebanese political class widely blamed for a crushing economic crisis that began in late 2019 and which the World Bank has dubbed one of the planet's worst in recent history.

The spokesman of Tunisia's Islamist-leaning Ennahdha party has been detained, his party said on Wednesday, denouncing the latest arrest of a prominent critic of President Kais Saied.

Abdelfattah Taghouti was detained by a national guard unit on Tuesday evening, Ennahdha said, demanding his immediate release.

More than 20 political figures have been arrested in the North African country in recent weeks, including members of the main opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front, and its main component, Ennahdha.