ALGIERS: An Algerian appeals court on Tuesday upheld a 20-year prison sentence for corruption against Chakib Khelil, energy minister for a decade under longtime president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the APS news agency reported.
The court also fined him two million dinars (about $13,600) and upheld prison sentences of five and six years respectively against Mohamed Meziane, ex-head of state oil and gas giant Sonatrach, and his deputy Abdelhafidh Feghouli.

GENEVA: More than 100 people, including many women, have been murdered in a Syrian camp in just 18 months, the UN said Tuesday, demanding countries repatriate their citizens.
The Al-Hol camp is increasingly unsafe and the child detainees are being condemned to a life with no future, said Imran Riza, the UN resident coordinator in Syria.
Al-Hol, in the Kurdish-controlled northeast, was meant as a temporary detention facility.

JEDDAH: Last week, Nayera Ashraf, a student at Mansoura University in Egypt, was beaten and stabbed in broad daylight as bystanders looked on in horror. She died later that day. The attacker was restrained and arrested. His motive for such a dreadful crime? The refusal of a marriage proposal.

TUNIS: A heatwave and fires are badly damaging Tunisia’s grain harvest, leading the farmers union to forecast that output will fall well short of government hopes.

Loss of grain production comes as the North African country struggles with food importation costs driven higher by the war in Ukraine.

Agriculture Minister Mhamoud Elyess Hamza this month forecast the 2022 grain harvest would reach 1.8 million tons, up 10 percent on last year’s.

NADOR, Morocco: A massive attempt by migrants to storm the barrier between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla resulted in “unprecedented violence” that killed at least 23 sub-Saharan Africans and has sparked fears of worse to come.

“It was like a war, we were holding rocks, little rocks, to fight,” said a 20-year-old Sudanese migrant at a detention center inside Melilla.

“I climbed up the fence but a Moroccan guard hit my hands. I fell unconscious on the Spanish side, where I was beaten up by Spanish forces,” said another.