With tears pouring down her cheeks, Syrian mother Shawafa Khodr mourns her daughter, missing since the crowded migrant boat she boarded hoping to join her fiance in Germany sank in the Mediterranean.

Khodr refuses to believe her daughter is dead, hoping against the mounting evidence that the young woman did not drown in the waters off Lebanon, but has somehow survived.

"I will wait for her every night and pray to God for her safety," 60-year-old Khodr said. "Maybe she is just lost on the beach somewhere".

The head of the Red Cross on Monday said he discussed in Iran the plight of Afghan migrants who fled their country after the Taliban took power last year.

"Afghanistan was very much present in the conversation, especially in the wake of the recent developments that we witnessed in August with the change in the government," Robert Mardini told AFP after two days of talks in Tehran with Iranian authorities.

"The discussions were positive. We see eye to eye," said Mardini, director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The United Nations warned Monday that it would cost $20 billion to clean up an oil spill in the event of the "imminent" break-up of an oil tanker abandoned off Yemen.

"Our recent visit to (the FSO Safer) with technical experts indicates that the vessel is imminently going to break up," the UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, David Gressly, said ahead of a conference, hosted by the UN and The Netherlands, to raise funds for an emergency operation to prevent an oil spill.

Saudi Arabia on Monday pitched aviation industry leaders on its plans to become a global travel hub, drawing scepticism from analysts who questioned how it could compete against regional heavyweights.

The conservative kingdom's aviation goals, part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's wide-ranging "Vision 2030" reforms, include more than tripling annual traffic to 330 million passengers by the end of the decade.

Pope Francis has postponed a trip to Lebanon initially planned for June over health concerns, Lebanon's tourism minister Walid Nassar said Monday.

Nassar did not elaborate on the "health reasons" behind the postponement, but the pope who has suffered from pain in his knee was seen using a wheelchair for the first time at a public event Thursday.

"Lebanon received a letter from the Vatican officially informing it of the decision to postpone the scheduled visit of the Pope to Lebanon," Nassar said in a statement published by the official National News Agency.

A French court opened hearings Monday in the case of the 2009 crash of a Yemenia Airways flight that killed 152 people but miraculously left a 12-year-old girl alive.

The Yemeni national airline, whose representatives will not be in the dock due to the country's still-raging civil war, faces a maximum fine of 225,000 euros ($240,000) for involuntary homicide and injuries in a trial expected to last four weeks.

Hundreds of people marched Monday in Belgrade, Sofia and Vienna to mark the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

Serbia, which aspires to join the European Union, is a traditional ally of Russia and refuses to impose sanctions on Moscow over the invasion of Ukraine.

Some 200 people taking part in the so-called "Immortal Regiment" march walked in silence through downtown Belgrade, cheering from time to time, and carried pictures of their loved ones killed during the war.

The EU diplomat seeking to revive a 2015 nuclear deal will visit Tehran this week, Iran announced Monday, as the United States voiced hope for progress.

Enrique Mora has played a key role as an intermediary between the United States and Iran during a year of on-off talks in Vienna that have been at a standstill since March.

Mora will meet with Ali Bagheri, the Islamic Republic of Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said at a weekly press briefing.

"Mora's trip moves the talks in the right direction," Khatibzadeh said.

Iraqi policeman Jundi Khodr Kalo was among thousands of Yazidis again forced to flee their homes this month, after fierce clashes between the army and local fighters in their Sinjar heartland.

"Last time we were displaced because we were afraid of the Islamic State" jihadist group, said Kalo, 37, from the non-Arab, Kurdish-speaking minority.

The Yazidis are a monotheistic, esoteric community who were massacred by IS when the extremists swept across Iraq in 2014.

As a law student in late 2019, Verena El Amil joined mass street protests against Lebanon's political elite. Now she wants to fight them at the ballot box.

At age 25, she is one of a growing number of independent candidates running in a May 15 parliamentary vote in the crisis-torn country.

"We are going to fight," the young lawyer, dressed in a black leather jacket and combat boots, said at a coffee shop outside Beirut.

"The slogans we screamed during the protests are the ones we want to carry into campaigns and into parliament."