Throwing more than $5 billion at a divisive new tour and walking away after five seasons does not look like good business, but LIV Golf wasn't all bad news for Saudi Arabia.

Oil-funded LIV, which poached top stars and sent golf's establishment into a tailspin, helped push the conservative kingdom into global view -- one of its key aims, experts say.

They said the exit, confirmed on Thursday after weeks of speculation, does not signal a flight of Saudi money from sport, even after the Middle East war that sparked Iranian attacks around the Gulf.

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, May 1 (Reuters) - Any shippers paying tolls to Iran for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, including charitable donations to organizations such as the Iranian Red Crescent Society, are at risk of punitive sanctions, the U.S. Treasury warned on Friday.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most strategically vital maritime routes, with about 20% of the world’s seaborne ​crude oil ​and liquefied ⁠natural gas flows passing through it.

Whenever Fatima al-Safadi hears a knock at the door, she imagines it might be her sons -- among dozens of people Israel has seized from southern Syria and whose fate remains unknown months later.

Mohammed, 40, and Ahmed, 36, were among seven people seized in a nighttime Israeli army incursion into the village of Beit Jinn, southwest of Damascus, in June last year.

By Alexander Cornwell

TEL AVIV, May 1 (Reuters) - A U.S. military-run centre near Gaza that critics say failed in its mission to monitor the Israel-Hamas ceasefire and boost aid flows to besieged Palestinians is set to be shut by the Trump administration, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The closing of the Civil-Military Coordination Centre (CMCC) in Israel would mark the latest blow to President Donald Trump's Gaza plan, already undermined by repeated Israeli attacks since the October truce and a refusal by Hamas to lay down its arms.

The UN refugee agency on Friday said the Middle East war had sent its freight rates soaring, hitting the delivery of aid to refugees in the wider region and Africa.

Shipping rates from UNHCR's three main source countries for emergency supplies -- India, Pakistan and China -- have shot up by nearly 18 percent, the agency said, while delivery delays and port congestion are also having an impact.

Every extra dollar spent on fuel and higher war-risk shipping insurance premiums is a dollar less that can be spent in the field, UNHCR added.

US President Donald Trump said Friday he was "not satisfied" with a new Iranian negotiating proposal, as peace talks remain frozen despite a weeks-long ceasefire.

Iran delivered the draft to mediator Pakistan on Thursday evening, the IRNA news agency reported, without detailing its contents.

"At this moment I'm not satisfied with what they're offering," Trump told reporters, blaming stalled talks on "tremendous discord" within Iran's leadership.

The war in the Middle East has forced the Gulf monarchies to rethink their oil and trade routes, but rerouting them will be no simple task, experts say.

Faced with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the only maritime entry point to the Gulf, the region's Arab nations are looking for ways to bypass Tehran's stranglehold on their exports.

A dozen members of the French navy scour screens for blinking lights indicating movement thousands of kilometres away near the Strait of Hormuz.

Since the start of the Iran war in late February, staff at a maritime security centre in western France have been helping merchant ships trapped in the Gulf.

LONDON, May 1 (Reuters) - A man who last year tried to enter Israel's London embassy armed with two knives and carrying a "martyrdom note" was on Friday convicted in a London court of preparing an act of terrorism.

Abdullah Albadri, 34, a failed asylum seeker from Kuwait, attempted to breach the embassy's perimeter in April 2025 because he wanted to send a message about "the killing of children", prosecutors said at his trial this month.

The latest developments in the Middle East war:

- US approves arms sales to Qatar, Israel -

The United States said it had approved a $4 billion sale of Patriot missiles to Gulf ally Qatar, as well as the sale of precision weapons systems to Israel for nearly $1 billion.

Both sales were deemed to support US "foreign policy and national security" objectives, the State Department said in a series of notices to Congress, amid ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

- US to withdraw troops from Germany -