Iran said Saturday it is reviewing a decades-old law that requires women to cover their heads, as it struggles to quell more than two months of protests linked to the dress code.
Protests have swept Iran since the September 16 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin arrested by the morality police for allegedly flouting the sharia-based law.
The US Navy said Saturday it had seized one million rounds of ammunition along with rocket fuses and propellant being smuggled on a fishing trawler from Iran to war-torn Yemen.
The cargo was discovered on Thursday "during a flag verification boarding", the Bahrain-based United States Fifth Fleet said in a statement, noting it was the "second major illegal weapons seizure within a month" along the maritime route.
"This significant interdiction clearly shows that Iran's unlawful transfer of lethal aid and destabilising behaviour continues," Vice Admiral Brad Cooper said.
Thousands of Islamists in Sudan rallied Saturday against efforts by the United Nations to solve the political crisis sparked by last year's coup, AFP journalists said.
The demonstrations, the latest by Islamist factions in recent weeks, came one day after military leaders and a key civilian bloc announced plans to sign an initial deal.
Political turmoil has gripped Sudan since army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan led an October 2021 military takeover, derailing a fragile transition to civilian rule installed after the 2019 ouster of long-time Islamist autocrat Omar al-Bashir.
Tunisia's powerful UGTT trade union chief took aim Saturday at legislative elections due later this month, claiming they serve no purpose in light of constitutional reforms that neutered political parties.
President Kais Saied last year sacked the government and suspended parliament, then this year extended his power grab with a constitutional referendum marred by an official turnout of barely 30 percent.
Iran's parliament and the judiciary are reviewing a law which requires women to cover their heads, and which triggered more than two months of deadly protests, the attorney general said.
The demonstrations began after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin, died in custody on September 16 after her arrest by Iran's morality police for an alleged breach of the dress code.
Russia on Saturday denounced a $60 price cap on its oil agreed by the EU, G7 and Australia, even as Ukraine suggested it was not tough enough and might have to be revisited.
"We will not accept this price cap," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told domestic news agencies, adding that Russia, the world's second-largest crude exporter, was "analysing" the move.
The $60 oil price cap will come into effect on Monday or soon after, alongside an EU embargo on maritime deliveries of Russian crude oil.
Black-clad women in Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan province on Friday joined nationwide protests sparked by Mahsa Amini's death, in what a rights group called a "rare" move in the staunchly conservative region.
Online videos showed dozens of women on the streets of the provincial capital Zahedan holding banners that declared "Woman, life, freedom" -- one of the main slogans of the protest movement that erupted in mid-September.
A US-led coalition fighting jihadists resumed regular patrols in Kurdish-held areas of northeast Syria on Friday after earlier Turkish air strikes, an AFP correspondent and a Kurdish military source said.
Patrols were reduced following the Turkish strikes that began on November 20 in Kurdish-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq, in response to a deadly Istanbul bombing that Ankara blamed on Kurdish groups.
The Kurds denied responsibility.
Hundreds of American troops are in Syria as part of the fight against remnants of the Islamic State group.
Major oil producers are expected to stick to their current output strategy or even slash production further when they meet on Sunday in the face of falling prices, a Russian oil price cap and an embargo on Russian crude shipments.
At their last ministerial session in October the 13-nation Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries headed by Riyadh and its 10 allies led by Moscow, collectively known as OPEC+, agreed to reduce output by two million barrels per day (bpd) from November.
A new law gives Turkey fresh ammunition to censor the media and silence dissent ahead of elections in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans to prolong his two decades in office, journalists and activists say.
Since 2014, when Erdogan became president, tens of thousands of people, from high-school teens to a former Miss Turkey have been prosecuted under a long-standing law that criminalises insulting the president.
The law, passed in parliament in October, could see reporters and social media users jailed for up to three years for spreading what is branded "fake news".
