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."

A French court will open 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.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad met with Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi during a brief visit to Tehran on Sunday, Iranian state television said.

"Assad has left Iran for Damascus after meeting separately with the supreme leader" and the president, the report said.

Iran is a major ally of Assad, backing him alongside Russia in Syria's more than decade long civil war.

Hundreds of Tunisians demonstrated Sunday in a show of support for President Kais Saied and a series of extraordinary measures he took since last July that critics have slammed as a "coup".

The rallies come as Saied faces mounting criticism over his July 2021 power grab, in which he sacked the government and suspended parliament before moving on to rule by decree.

Demonstrators gathered in the capital's central Bourguiba Avenue -- the epicentre of vast protests that toppled former leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011 -- in response to a call by a pro-Saied alliance.

Lebanese expatriates in 48 countries including France and the United Arab Emirates voted Sunday ahead of the May 15 parliamentary elections, state media reported.

The critical election comes amid an unprecedented financial crisis that has spurred a mass population exodus, with opposition figures pinning their hopes for a change on the diaspora vote and experts saying the political status quo is expected to remain.

Ons Jabeur's long-stated goal is that her historic exploits on court lead to more Arab women taking up tennis -- becoming the first Arab player to win a Grand Slam in next month's French Open final would do wonders to achieve that.

The 27-year-old Tunisian became a front-rank contender for tennis's greatest prize on clay with her gutsy three-set victory over American Jessica Pegula in the Madrid on Saturday.

In doing so the engaging and highly expressive Jabeur wrote another piece of tennis history.

Two Palestinians were shot dead and another was wounded in separate incidents in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem on Sunday, officials said, the latest in a spate of violence.

The unrest came hours after the arrest of two Palestinians suspected of axing three Israelis to death, and as a series of anti-Israeli attacks and bloody violence has left dozens dead since late March, among them Palestinian and Arab-Israeli perpetrators.

Saudi Arabia's ageing King Salman will remain in hospital after undergoing tests including a colonoscopy, state media reported Sunday.

The kingdom has for years sought to quell speculation over the health of the 86-year-old monarch, who has ruled the world's top oil exporter since 2015.

He entered King Faisal Specialist Hospital in the coastal city of Jeddah on Saturday "to conduct some medical examinations", according to an official report, citing a royal court statement.