ANKARA: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ended months of diplomatically charged delays and  asked parliament to quickly back Finland’s bid to join NATO.
A simultaneous decision by fellow holdout Hungary to schedule a Finnish ratification vote for March 27 means the US-led defense alliance will likely grow to 31 nations within a few months.
NATO’s expansion into a country with a 1,340-km border with Russia will roughly double the length of the bloc’s current frontier with its Cold War-era foe.

AL-MUKALLA: A commercial ship was attacked by machine-gun fire on Friday off the coast of the western Yemeni province of Hodeidah — the first maritime incident in the Red Sea since the beginning of the year, according to an analysis group based in the UK.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations issued an alert and reported that the vessel’s security team fired back at the attackers and that both the vessel and its crew were unharmed. 

ANKARA: After the meeting of Turkish and Egyptian foreign ministers in Cairo on Saturday — the first such visit after a decade of strained ties — the question now is: How might this dialogue translate into action?
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry discussed several issues, including Libya — where they support opposing sides, Cyprus and maritime disagreements in the Eastern Mediterranean.

TEHRAN: An Iranian court sentenced two people to death over an October attack on a shrine in the southern city of Shiraz that cost over a dozen lives, the judiciary said Saturday.
The pair were convicted of assisting in “corruption on earth, armed rebellion and acting against national security,” the judiciary’s Mizan Online website reported, citing Kazem Moussavi, the chief justice of Fars province.

TRIPOLI: Omar Zlitni holds a decades-old, black-and-white photo of himself as a boxer in his prime, posing in shorts and a training vest before Libya’s then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, banned his beloved sport.
Boxing was “in his blood,” said the 63-year-old Tripoli resident who proudly keeps the image as his phone’s wallpaper.
In 1979, he was just 19 when boxing, along with wrestling and other combat sports, was banned by Qaddafi, who considered such contests a threat to his personality cult.