Sebastien Loeb grabbed victory Sunday in the eighth stage of the Dakar Rally after Carlos Sainz was hit with a five-minute penalty.
The victory lifted Loeb to fourth overall but he remains almost two hours behind rally leader Nasser Al-Attiyah.
The 48-year-old Frenchman won the stage by 2 minutes and 11 seconds in his Prodrive from Qatari Al-Attiyah after 822 km of racing through valleys and sand between Al-Duwadimi and Riyadh.
Dozens of Iranians gathered Sunday outside the French embassy in Tehran protesting against cartoons of the Islamic republic's supreme leader by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
The magazine on Wednesday published caricatures of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in support of the protests in Iran, sparked by the September 16 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, following her arrest for allegedly violating the country's strict dress code.
Sebastien Loeb grabbed victory Sunday in the eighth stage of the Dakar Rally after Carlos Sainz was hit with a five-minute penalty.
The victory lifted Loeb to fourth overall but he remains almost two hours behind overall leader Nasser Al-Attiyah.
The 48-year-old Frenchman won the stage by 2 minutes and 11 seconds in his Prodrive from Qatari Al-Attiyah after 822 km of racing through valleys and sand between Al-Duwadimi and Riyadh.
Past the sandbags and anti-tank obstacles in Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, theatre director Mustafa Sheta ponders the fate of Palestinian thespians.
"We are under a very abnormal situation," Sheta told AFP at the camp's Freedom Theatre.
The streets were silent that December day as residents had called a public strike to protest Israeli forces killing a 16-year-old Palestinian girl in Jenin hours earlier.
Iran's Islamic clerical regime is divided in its response to months of unprecedented protests, wavering between repression and what it views as conciliatory gestures trying to quell the discontent, analysts say.
"The conflicting messages we are getting from the Iranian regime suggest an internal debate on how to deal with ongoing protests," said Nader Hashemi, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver.
"In most authoritarian regimes, there are hawks and doves" who disagree on how repressive the state should be during crises, he said.
An Iranian man has been arrested in western Germany suspected of preparing an "Islamist attack" using cyanide and ricin, police and prosecutors said Sunday.
The 32-year-old man was "suspected of having prepared a serious act of violence threatening the security of the state by obtaining cyanide and ricin with a view to committing an Islamist attack", police in Muenster and Recklinghausen, along with the Duesseldorf prosecutor's office, said in a statement.
Thousands of Israelis protested on Saturday against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new government, regarded as the most right-wing in Israeli history, an AFP correspondent said.
Protesters brandished signs with slogans including "Democracy in danger" and "Together against fascism and apartheid" in the coastal city of Tel Aviv.
Some waved Israeli and rainbow flags while others held a large banner reading "crime minister" -- a slogan widely used by Israelis during regular demonstrations against Netanyahu in past years.
French politicians paid tribute Saturday to Charlie Hebdo staff and other victims of the January 2015 Islamist attacks, days after the satirical weekly's latest edition sparked outrage in Iran.
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted the names of all 17 victims of a spate of attacks eight years ago in and around Paris, including the 12 people killed at the offices of Charlie Hebdo.
"We will never forget you," he added, with a cartoon by the well-known French cartoonist Plantu below.
Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo could make his Saudi Arabian debut on January 22 after he was successfully registered by new team Al Nassr, a club source told AFP on Saturday.
Ronaldo, who was unveiled to fans this week, joined the squad list after Al Nassr terminated Manchester United-linked striker Vincent Aboubakar to stay within the maximum eight foreign nationals stipulated by the Saudi league.
Thousands of demonstrators marched in central Paris on Saturday to pay tribute to three Kurdish activists murdered a decade ago.
The march, an annual event since the killings on January 9, 2013, came two weeks after an eerily similar triple slaying on December 23 at the Kurdish Cultural Centre in Paris -- just a few minutes' walk from the site of the earlier shootings.
The organisers said at least 25,000 people from all over Europe had joined the rally. Paris police put the figure at 10,000.
