Turkey intensified its crackdown on anti-government protests on Friday, arresting the lawyer of the jailed Istanbul mayor and targeting more journalists, as the country faces its biggest wave of unrest in more than a decade.
Nine days after the arrest and subsequent jailing of Istanbul's popular opposition mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, demonstrators were again out on the streets on Thursday night, despite a growing sense of fear.
Israel said on Friday it will strike anywhere in Lebanon it sees a threat, after rocket fire prompted it to bomb Beirut for the first time during the fragile four-month-old truce with Hezbollah.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam described the strike on Beirut's southern suburbs as "a dangerous escalation" and French President Emmanuel Macron called it an "unacceptable" truce violation.
The health ministry reported no casualties from the Beirut attack but said Israeli strikes in the south killed five people.
Saudi tailor Habib Mohammed's shop once made ornate, hand-woven cloaks for royals, a time-honoured craft he is determined to preserve even as mass-produced garments flood the market, threatening his traditional business.
He makes "bisht", a long gown which for centuries has been a status symbol, worn by kings and princes -- and ordinary men -- and could take a week of meticulous work to create.
Now, with cheap Chinese-made robes taking a bite out of his business, the 60-year-old tailor is struggling to make a profit, and his only son wouldn't take over the beleaguered shop.
Australia's competition regulator gave the go-ahead Friday for Qatar Airways to launch an alliance with Virgin Australia.
The decision clears Qatar Airways to cooperate for five years in an "integrated alliance" with the Australian carrier, in which it will take a 25-percent stake.
The pact would double flights between Doha and major Australian airports, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said.
The boost in Australia-Middle East flights would create "minimal, if any, public detriment", the authority's commissioner, Anna Brakey, said in a statement.
Iran has sent a response to a letter from US President Donald Trump that called for nuclear talks and warned of possible military action if it refuses, its foreign minister said Thursday.
"This official response includes a letter in which our position regarding the current situation and Mr Trump's letter has been fully explained to the other party," Abbas Araghchi told the official IRNA news agency.
He added that the letter was delivered to Oman, which has served as an intermediary in the past in the absence of US-Iranian diplomatic relations.
Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces vowed on Thursday there would be "no retreat and no surrender" after rival troops of the regular army retook nearly all of central Khartoum.
From inside the recaptured presidential palace, Sudan's army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, at war with his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo since April 2023, had on Wednesday declared the capital "free" from the RSF.
A US judge ordered Donald Trump's administration on Thursday to preserve messages from a chat group used by top national security officials to discuss plans for an attack on Yemen's Huthi rebels.
The ruling adds to the pressure on the White House after the Atlantic magazine revealed that its editor had been accidentally added to the group on the commercially-available Signal app.
Republican Trump has dismissed the scandal as a "witch-hunt" while attacking the Atlantic and its editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who broke the story earlier this week.
Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has accused Israel of exploiting followers of his minority faith in Syria as part of a broader plan to divide the Middle East along sectarian lines.
Israel wants "to implement the plan it has always had... which is to break up the region into confessional entities and extend the chaos," said Jumblatt, a key figure in Lebanese politics for more than four decades.
AFP photographer Yasin Akgul, who was arrested this week covering Turkey's worst unrest in more than a decade, was freed Thursday from an Istanbul jail, AFP correspondents said, though his lawyer said the charges against him remain.
Akgul was detained in a pre-dawn raid at his home Monday and remanded in custody by an Istanbul court a day later.
He was charged with "taking part in illegal rallies and marches", drawing outrage from rights groups and the Paris-based news agency.
Mohammed Hussein Mohammedie was just 19 when he left Iraq and attempted the perilous English Channel crossing in November 2021.
He died alongside 26 others when their dinghy sank.
His family were refugees from Iran and suffered financial hardship, his father told a UK inquiry into the capsizing of the dinghy in the early hours of November 24, 2021.
"He wanted to be different. He wanted to be brave," Hussein Mohammedie said of his son's ambitions to leave Iraq, during the final days of the inquiry this week.
