Iraq's Lake Hamrin, a once-vast reservoir northeast of Baghdad that is the sole source of water for irrigation across Diyala province, has nearly dried out, a senior official said Friday.
Successive years of low rainfall and a sharp reduction in the flow of water down the Sirwan River from neighbouring Iran have reduced much of the lake to a dust bowl, the official told AFP.
Syrian authorities on Friday rejected plans by Turkey to return one million Syrian refugees to a "safe zone" on the border, state media reported.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in early May said Ankara was aiming to encourage one million Syrian refugees to return to their country by building them housing and local infrastructure there.
Turkey is today home to more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees, who fled after a civil war broke out in 2011 in Turkey's southern neighbour.
An Israeli city is testing whether an artificial intelligence programme that detects drowning threats can help save lives off its beaches.
The programme, developed by a company called SightBit, uses information collected from surveillance cameras to determine who is in the water -- an adult or child, for example -- if they are moving or limp, and the current's movement at that location.
If a threat is determined, the programme sends an alert to a tablet held by the user -- a lifeguard, in this case -- with urgent instructions to act.
Iraq's renowned communist poet Muzaffar al-Nawab, who faced jail time and exile in the 1960s, died Friday in an Emirati hospital aged 88, Iraqi authorities announced.
The culture ministry said he died after a long battle against illness, without giving details.
"He lives on in the spirit of all those who sing his immortal poems," President Barham Saleh tweeted.
Born in 1934 into a prominent Baghdad family, Nawab was renowned for his poems filled with revolutionary fervour, a commitment to the communist cause and criticism of Arab dictatorships.
Amnesty International has urged Yemen's Huthi rebels to free four journalists facing the death penalty for "espionage" in the war-torn country, ahead of an appeal court hearing on Sunday.
The four, Abdul Khaleq Amran, Tawfiq al-Mansouri, Harith Hamid and Akram al-Walidi were arrested in June 2015 in Yemen's rebel-held capital Sanaa.
"Yemen's Huthi de facto authorities must quash the death sentences and order the immediate release of four Yemeni journalists who are facing execution following a grossly unfair trial," the rights group said in a statement on Friday.
Weeks of Israeli raids and clashes with Palestinians have filled residents of the flashpoint Jenin refugee camp with fear and anxiety, and a longing to "live in dignity".
A hub of armed Palestinian groups, the Jenin area in the north of the occupied West Bank has been targeted by Israeli raids time and again since a wave of anti-Israeli attacks in late March.
The operations to track down suspects and clashes with Palestinians have often turned deadly for both sides.
It's no mystery why Jordanian Lina Fayyad has been nicknamed "Fierce Savage" -- watching as she lands successive blows in the cage, it's clear she is poised to take mixed martial arts by storm.
With her long maroon hair and small frame, she cuts an unusual figure in the world of MMA, and perhaps even more so within the country and region from which she hails, where women are virtual strangers to the sport.
As the football world prepares to head to Qatar in six months' time, this World Cup is set to bookend the era in which Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have been the sport's two pre-eminent players.
At the time, it felt like the 2018 tournament in Russia marked a turning point as a teenage Kylian Mbappe became a global superstar by helping France become world champions.
Mbappe consoling Messi after starring as France beat Argentina in the last 16 was an iconic image of that World Cup.
Sandstorms have engulfed the Middle East in recent days, in a phenomenon experts warn could proliferate because of climate change, putting human health at grave risk.
At least 4,000 people went to hospital Monday for respiratory issues in Iraq where eight sandstorms have blanketed the country since mid-April.
That was on top of the more than 5,000 treated in Iraqi hospitals for similar respiratory ailments earlier this month.
The phenomenon has also smothered Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with more feared in the coming days.
A crowd of Jewish worshippers broke through police barriers on Thursday at an annual pilgrimage in Israel's Mount Meron, a year after 45 people were crushed to death in a stampede.
Israeli police said "dozens of extremists" broke into a section of the religious site while "wildly flinging the fences and endangering human life."
The police retreated from the site when a group of worshippers broke barriers and stormed in, an AFP photographer said, adding that officers later returned.
