AFP news

Bulgaria's booming arms industry has never had it so good, with exports estimated at $4.3 billion last year (about four billion euros) -- three times its previous record.

Dress rules have stoked strong passions in Iran, especially restrictions on women who have long been required to wear modest clothing and headscarves.

Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls are prohibited from going to secondary school.

Last October, a court handed Almadi a term of 16 years behind bars, which last month was lengthened to 19 years before his surprise release on Tuesday, Ibrahim said.

Smotrich had already faced international rebuke in early March after calling for a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank to be "wiped out", amid spiralling violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The sit-down was to be unexpectedly mirrored in Kyiv, where Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was en route to meet Putin's nemesis Volodymyr Zelensky.

The move to save Credit Suisse aimed to prevent a wider crisis as it is among the 30 global banks considered "too big to fail".

Kishida is the last G7 leader to visit the war-torn country and has come under increasing pressure to make the trip, as Japan hosts the grouping's summit this May.

Haute couture has given way to upcycled outfits, sourced entirely from used clothes, as the models strut, pause and pivot on the runway, a sign of the growing popularity of chic, environmentally friendly vintage wear among young Iraqis.

Women first took to the field in the region 100 kilometres (62 miles) north of Cairo in 1995, 30 years after the first men's team was established.

The oil-rich country remains traumatised from the years of war, occupation and bloody sectarian turmoil that followed the operation launched on March 20, 2003.

The crisis led US authorities last week to promise support for other lenders and depositors, in a move aimed at preventing a run on banks.

Soon after, another round of explosions was heard in a neighbourhood two kilometres (one mile) away.

An Israeli government official, requesting anonymity because not authorised to speak publicly about the talks, implied a longer timeline.

Beijing seeks to depict itself as a neutral party to the conflict, neither condemning nor explicitly supporting the Russian offensive.

The trip by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad comes after a visit to Oman last month, his only official engagements in Arab countries since the start of Syria's war in 2011.

That changed on February 6, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed more than 48,000 in southeastern Turkey and nearly 6,000 over the border in Syria, leaving entire cities in ruins.

Salameh, 72, one of the world's longest-serving central bank governors having held the post for three decades, was a previously untouchable figure in Lebanon.

Ukraine has repeatedly asked its Western allies to send warplanes -- although seeking primarily modern US-made F-16s -- but so far no Western countries had committed to give jets to Kyiv.

The special forces aim to defend the nearby village of Grygorivka in the Donetsk region, about 10 kilometres (six miles) northwest of Bakhmut, which is coming under heavy Russian shelling.

The two countries had protested when reports emerged last month that Visit Saudi Arabia would be among the sponsors of the 32-team football tournament hosted by New Zealand and Australia from July 20.

A rollercoaster week was on course to end on a positive note after several Wall Street titans including JP Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup stumped up $30 billion to deposit into troubled First Republic.

Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, met with Emirati president Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in the capital Abu Dhabi to discuss "opportunities for enhancing cooperation," according to the official WAM news agency.

The 52-year-old Swiss lawyer, who succeeded the disgraced Sepp Blatter in 2016, was waved in for a third term by acclamation, just as he was four years ago, by delegates from the 211 member federations.

The number of Islamic schools has grown across Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, with teenage girls increasingly attending classes after they were banned from secondary schools.

Framed by mountains running between the Mediterranean Sea and Turkey's border with Syria, Antakya was home to Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Arab and Ottoman empires over more than two millennia.

Police wanted to arrest Khan for skipping court dates to answer allegations he failed to declare gifts he received during his three-and-a-half-year turn in office --or the profits made from selling them.

Ebadi -- who won the Nobel Prize in 2003 and now lives in exile outside Iran -- insisted that "sanctions work" against the authorities in Tehran.

The brutal repression of the 2011 protests, which began during the Middle East's Arab Spring uprisings, triggered a complex civil war that drew in foreign powers and jihadists.