Australia coach Graham Arnold warned his team they must improve to beat Peru and make it to a fifth straight World Cup after Ajdin Hrustic fired a late winner in a nerve-wracking 2-1 play-off victory over United Arab Emirates in Doha.

The Eintracht Frankfurt midfielder's deflected volley in the 84th minute decided the feverish Asian playoff on Tuesday in the Ahmad bin Ali Stadium that will host seven games in the World Cup finals in November.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised Tuesday to pursue accountability over the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh wherever facts lead, amid heated dispute between Israeli and Palestinian authorities on how she died.

The well-known Al Jazeera journalist, a Palestinian-American, was killed on May 11 as she was covering an Israeli army operation in the Jenin camp in the north of the West Bank.

Phil Mickelson headlines a field of 48 golfers at this week's LIV Golf Invitational London -- the inaugural event in a breakaway series threatening to tear the sport apart.

Other big-name players who will tee off at the Centurion Club on Thursday include Dustin Johnson, Martin Kaymer and Sergio Garcia.

AFP Sport takes a look at some of the issues around the Saudi-funded tour, which aims to "supercharge the game of professional golf".

Format

There are eight events in the inaugural LIV Golf Invitational Series.

A former US schoolteacher who became a high-ranking Islamic State official and organized an all-female IS military battalion, pleaded guilty Tuesday to supporting a foreign terrorist group, the Justice Department said.

Kansas-born Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, admitted to engaging in "terrorism-related activities" in Syria, Libya, and Iraq between 2011 and 2019.

Dictators are bad, except, well, when they're kind of OK: welcome to the moral gymnastics that Joe Biden is only the latest US president to embrace in a complicated world.

Biden's decision to exclude the far-left leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from this week's regional Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles is being touted as US defense of democracy in action.

"We just don’t believe dictators should be invited and... and so we don’t regret that," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. "The president will stand by his principle."

Under a blazing sun, far from the skyscrapers and SUVs of modern Dubai, hundreds of enthusiasts took to Gulf waters in traditional wooden vessels, keen to preserve an ancient heritage.

Around Sir Bu Nair, a teardrop-shaped island roughly 100 kilometres (60 miles) from both Dubai and Abu Dhabi, two of seven emirates that make up the UAE, 118 teams raced dhows, the sailboats that have plied the Arabian peninsula's waters for centuries.

A coalition of tribes in East Sudan announced on Tuesday the end of a sit-in which blocked roads to the crucial Red Sea port, after the governor announced his resignation.

The Port Sudan sit-in protested a 2020 peace deal the country's Beja tribes say made too many concessions at the expense of their group, which has long complained of marginalisation.

Hundreds of protesters demanded the parts of the deal relating to their eastern region be scrapped and the dismissal of Red Sea state governor, whom they accused of supporting the deal.

Thieves broke into more than 160 safe boxes at a branch of Iran's biggest bank and made off with the contents, the bank said on Tuesday.

State-owned Bank Melli said on its website that 168 rented safe boxes had been broken into at the branch, one of its most important.

Neither the bank nor police revealed the amount of the loss, as is customary in such cases.

The thieves took advantage of a national holiday on Sunday to enter the branch on Enghelab Street, a major artery in Tehran.

The United Arab Emirates has turned down a South African request to extradite two Indian-born brothers accused of systemically plundering state resources.

A marathon inquiry last year found that the Guptas' ties with Zuma lay at the heart of the scheme, which according to one expert cost South Africa billions of dollars.

Here's a factfile:

- Who are the Guptas? -

The brothers comprise Ajay, Atul and Rajesh ("Tony") Gupta, who hail from the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Israel's occupation and discrimination against Palestinians are the main causes of the endless cycles of violence, UN investigators said Tuesday, prompting angry Israeli protests.

A high-level team of investigators, appointed last year by the United Nations Human Rights Council to probe "all underlying root causes" in the decades-long conflict, pointed the finger squarely at Israel.