An American woman who grew up on a farm in Kansas, converted to Islam and joined the Islamic State in Syria, where she led an all-female military battalion, is to be sentenced Tuesday for providing support to a foreign terrorist group.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to terror charges in June in a US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.
It was the river that is said to have watered the biblical Garden of Eden and helped give birth to civilisation itself.
But today the Tigris is dying.
Human activity and climate change have choked its once mighty flow through Iraq, where -- with its twin river the Euphrates -- it made Mesopotamia a cradle of civilisation thousands of years ago.
Iraq may be oil-rich but the country is plagued by poverty after decades of war and by droughts and desertification.
Iranian protesters rallied again Sunday, defying an order by the powerful Revolutionary Guards to stop the demonstrations -- now in their seventh week -- sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.
Students gathered overnight and Sunday across Iran, even after Major General Hossein Salami, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had warned demonstrators: "Do not come to the streets!"
Arab leaders are to meet in the Algerian capital on Tuesday for their first summit since a string of normalisation deals with Israel that have divided the region.
The 22-member Arab League held its last summit in 2019, prior to both the coronavirus pandemic and the UAE's historic US-backed deal establishing diplomatic ties with the Jewish state.
The agreement, only Israel's third such deal with an Arab state, was followed by similar accords with Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, deepening the kingdom's decades-old rivalry with its neighbour Algeria.
Israelis on Sunday shot dead a Palestinian who, according to the army and medics, had rammed his car into soldiers in the occupied West Bank.
The incident near the city of Jericho comes amid mounting violence across Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
"An assailant accelerated his vehicle toward IDF (Israeli army) soldiers who were at a bus station adjacent to the Nabi Musa Junction," the army said, before he continued and drove at other soldiers nearby.
US oil giant ConocoPhillips on Sunday agreed to take another major stake in Qatar's expansion of natural gas production, the Gulf state's energy minister said.
Energy Minister Saad Sherida al-Kaabi also said Qatar was talking with Asian nations -- the major market for Qatari gas -- over a share in its campaign to increase annual production by 60 percent to 126 million tonnes a year by 2027.
Lebanon's outgoing head of state, Michel Aoun, left the presidential palace Sunday, a day before his mandate expires without a designated successor, deepening the country's political crisis.
His six-year term was marred by mass protests, a painful economic downturn and the August 2020 mega-explosion of ammonium nitrate that killed hundreds and laid waste to swathes of Beirut.
Iraq has long drilled the desert for oil, but now climate stress, drought and reduced river flows are forcing it to dig ever deeper for a more precious resource: water.
The war-scarred nation and major crude exporter is one of the world's five countries most impacted by key effects of the climate crisis, says the United Nations.
Compounding the water stress, upstream dams, mainly in Turkey, have vastly reduced the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates, the once mighty rivers that gave birth to Mesopotamian civilisation.
Little rainfall, aggressive heatwaves and worsening drought make the Middle East the most water-stressed region in the world, with climate change threatening to displace millions of people.
Hussein Abu Saddam, head of the farmers' syndicate in Egypt which is hosting the COP27 global climate summit in November, told AFP he is already witness to a climate-induced exodus from the countryside.
Former premier Benjamin Netanyahu's record run as Israel's leader would not have been possible without the unwavering support of ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties. But are they getting ready to part ways?
Party leaders say no, insisting they will not join any prospective anti-Netanyahu coalition after Tuesday's election, as it would not protect their deeply religious values.
The two parties representing the ultra-Orthodox community in parliament were booted out of government in June 2021 when a motley coalition of Netanyahu's rivals ousted him and took power.
