An Iraqi man who sought political asylum in the United States plotted to kill former president George W. Bush, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

Shihab Ahmed Shihab, 52, told an FBI informant that he wanted to smuggle at least four other Iraqis into the country over the border with Mexico to undertake the plot, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court in Columbus, Ohio.

Two of the hit team would be former Iraqi intelligence agents, while the others would be members of Islamic State or another Qatar-based hardline group Shihab called "al-Raed."

Turkey's top diplomat announced Tuesday a raft of new agreements to bolster the struggling Palestinian economy, during the first high-level Turkish visit to the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 15 years.

During Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu's trip to Ramallah, Turkey signed nine new pacts with the embattled Palestinian Authority, ranging from agriculture to education and trade.

The death toll from the collapse of a tower block in southwestern Iran rose to 14 on Tuesday, as the authorities announced the arrest of officials accused of being "responsible" for the tragedy.

State television had said Monday that the 10-storey unfinished Metropol building in Abadan, the capital of Khuzestan province, had partially collapsed.

"According to the latest figures, 14 people died and 32 were injured," rising from Monday's death toll of six, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told the official IRNA news agency from Abadan.

Following the fatal shooting of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh during a raid in the occupied West Bank, AFP has looked at the Israeli army's record of probing previous journalist deaths.

The Qatar-based TV channel alleged that Palestinian-American Abu Akleh, 51, who was wearing a blue flak vest marked "Press", was killed deliberately by an Israeli soldier on May 11.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said an initial investigation had not determined whether she was killed by stray Palestinian gunfire or an Israeli bullet aimed at a militant.

Thousands attended the funeral Tuesday of an Iranian Revolutionary Guards colonel who was shot dead in Tehran in what authorities have dubbed an "assassination" by agents of the United States and its allies.

Colonel Sayyad Khodai was killed on Sunday by a gunman on the back of a motorcycle as he sat in his car outside his home.

President Ebrahim Raisi vowed on Monday to avenge the killing -- the most high profile inside Iran since that of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020.

Iran had accused Israel of masterminding that attack.

Samira hears the same message from Turkish politicians on the television day and night: Syrian refugees like her must return home. But her home near Damascus is still not safe, she says.

The 44-year-old from Ghouta is one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees in Turkey's Sanliurfa province, which shares a long border with Syria.

Civil war in Samira's homeland is estimated to have killed nearly half a million people and displaced millions since it began with a brutal crackdown of anti-government protests in 2011.

The famed river bridges of the Iranian city of Isfahan are a beloved tourist draw -- but much of the time their stone arches span just sand and rocks, not water.

Drought and upstream water diversions have seen the Zayandeh Rood, "fertile river" in Persian, run dry since 2000, with only rare exceptions.

Sitting on a quay with two friends, 60-year-old Jalal Mirahmadi gazed with melancholy at the riverbed, which became the site of a farmers' protest late last year.

Lebanese law student Charbel Chaaya spent the election campaign distributing flyers in Beirut and trying to convince his parents to vote for independents to shake the grip of established parties.

The 21-year-old activist is one of many young voters who went against their parents' political views, and helped propel at least 13 independents to parliament last week for the first time in decades.

"My parents think I'm too idealistic, that this country will never change," he said, adding that his father voted for a traditional Christian party, the Lebanese Forces.

British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe said in an interview on Monday that she was forced to sign a last-minute false confession before she was freed after six years' imprisonment in Tehran.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, returned home in March along with a fellow dual national, after Britain agreed to pay a longstanding debt to Iran.

She was imprisoned for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Iranian government and for propaganda against Iran, charges she has always denied.

Israel's army said Monday that if an Israeli soldier fired the bullet that killed Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, it did not appear that the soldier was guilty of criminal misconduct.

"Given that Ms Abu Akleh was killed in the midst of an active combat zone, there can be no immediate suspicion of criminal activity absent further evidence," it said in a statement citing Military Advocate Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi.