AL-MUKALLA, Yemen: A Yemeni military commander at the forefront of the fight against terror groups in Yemen for more than a decade was killed in a blast from an explosive device planted by Al-Qaeda in southern Yemen on Thursday.

Brig. Abdul Latif Al-Sayed, commander of the Security Belt forces in Abyan province, was the highest-ranking official to die in the campaign against Al-Qaeda in more than a year. 

Al-Sayed and three of his troops were killed when their vehicle was destroyed by an IED planted by Al-Qaeda in the Omaran valley.

RAMALLAH: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas fired most of the governors in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, responding to long-standing demands for a political shake-up as frustration grows with the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority.

BAGHDAD: Iraq’s official media regulator on Tuesday ordered all media and social media companies operating in the Arab state not to use the term “homosexuality” and instead to say “sexual deviance,” a government spokesperson said and a document from the regulator shows.

The Iraqi Communications and Media Commission document said that the use of the term “gender” was also banned. It prohibited all phone and internet companies licensed by it from using the terms in any of their mobile applications.

TEHRAN: Iran executed five men by hanging on Wednesday after convicting them of gang raping a woman in the northwest of the country last year, the judiciary said.

The “five men who had kidnapped and raped a woman in the city of Marand in May 2022 were executed today (Wednesday),” the judiciary’s Mizan Online website announced.

The men, who were arrested four days after the gang rape in East Azerbaijan province, were implicated in other crimes, Mizan said without elaborating.

UNITED NATIONS: Sexual violence is being committed in Sudan on a “sickening scale,” while fighting in the Darfur region is reopening “old wounds of ethnic tension” that could engulf the country, United Nations officials told the Security Council on Wednesday.
“The alarming accounts of sexual violence that are heard from people who have fled to Port Sudan are just a fraction of those being repeated at a sickening scale from conflict hotspots across the country,” said senior UN aid official Edem Wosornu.