DUBAI (Reuters) -Iran has downgraded diplomatic ties with Australia, its foreign ministry said on Thursday, a week after Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador over accusations that Tehran directed two antisemitic arson attacks in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne.

"According to diplomatic law and in response to Australia's action, the Islamic Republic has also reciprocally reduced the level of Australia's diplomatic presence in Iran," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said, adding that Canberra's ambassador had left Iran.

One of thousands of public servants in Gaza's Hamas-run government, Karim, a public works ministry employee, received what seemed like an ordinary message on his phone: an invitation "for a coffee".

The text gave a time for a meeting near a school sheltering displaced people amid the wreckage and rubble of nearly two years of war between Hamas and Israel in the Palestinian territory.

KHARTOUM (Reuters) -When journalist Shamael Elnoor left Sudan at the outbreak of war in 2023, Sudanese newspapers were already suffering under an economic crisis and the worldwide shift to digital news.

Then the fighting brought presses to an immediate standstill - leaving busy newsrooms in Khartoum empty and ransacked.

"Since the first bullet was fired, all newspapers stopped," said Elnoor, walking through a warehouse with old pre-war newspapers scattered around a printing press gathering dust.

By Andrew Goudsward

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The suspect accused of gunning down two Israeli embassy staffers outside a Washington museum in what U.S. authorities have called an anti-Israel hate crime is set to appear in court on Thursday to enter a plea to a raft of criminal charges.

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

CAIRO (Reuters) -Israeli bombardment pushed more Palestinians out of their homes in Gaza City on Thursday, while thousands of residents defied Israeli orders to leave, remaining behind in the ruins in the path of Israel's latest advance.

Gaza health authorities said Israeli fire across the enclave had killed at least 28 people on Thursday, most of them in Gaza City, where Israeli forces have advanced through the outer suburbs and are now a few km (miles) from the city centre.

French director Francois Ozon has dared to do what so many other filmmakers have shied away from -- adapting one of French literature's most-read classics, Albert Camus's "The Stranger", for the big screen.

The "8 Women" director said this week he had rediscovered Camus's 1942 novel after first reading it in school like so many other French teenagers -- but not really understanding its deeper absurdist meaning.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -Nelson Mandela's grandson has said Palestinians' lives under Israeli occupation are worse than anything Black South Africans experienced under apartheid, and urged the global community to come to their aid.

Mandla Mandela, 51, spoke to Reuters on Wednesday evening at Johannesburg Airport, where he was boarding a flight to Tunisia to join a flotilla aiming to deliver food and humanitarian supplies to Gaza despite an Israeli naval blockade.

By Sayed Hassib and Charlotte Greenfield

KABUL/MAZAR DARA, Afghanistan (Reuters) -Rescue workers battled to pull bodies from the rubble of homes razed in Afghanistan's earthquakes this week, as time runs out for survivors, who face a bleak future with global aid agencies warning of dwindling funds for food, shelter and medicines.

Search operations ran late into Wednesday in the quake-hit mountainous eastern areas as more bodies were dug out, the Taliban administration said, adding that the death toll had crossed 1,457 but exact numbers had yet to be compiled.

ANKARA (Reuters) -Turkish authorities have banned a concert of Enrico Macias, a French singer of Algerian-Jewish origin, after calls for protest over his pro-Israeli stance.

The Istanbul governor's office late on Wednesday said that Macias' performance scheduled for Friday evening in the city has been banned "after intense calls for protests against the concert."

Such protests would place protesters "in an unjust position legally, and cause grievances," the office said in a statement.

Colombia's coal exports fell by almost half in July compared to the same month last year, official figures showed Wednesday, amid a global price crisis and days after President Gustavo Petro's ban on sales to Israel.

Colombia is Latin America's leading coal producer but the sector has contracted for five consecutive quarters due to the collapse of international prices and domestic policies.