INCIRLIK AIR BASE: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday announced further aid to Turkiye and said Washington would provide longer term help to Ankara as it seeks to rebuild following this month’s earthquake.
A 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkiye’s southeast and neighboring Syria on Feb. 6, killing more than 45,000 people and leaving a million-plus homeless, with the economic cost of the disaster expected to run into billions of dollars.

RABAT: Moroccan trade union activists protested Sunday in the capital Rabat and other cities to denounce surging costs of food and fuel, defying a government ban against marches.
Protesters from the Democratic Labour Confederation (CDT) staged rallies outside their offices in Rabat and Casablanca as well as other cities “following the decision of the authorities to ban marches,” senior CDT member Rajae Kassab said.

BERLIN: The Berlin film festival, long a champion of Iran’s embattled independent directors, is spotlighting its citizens’ fight for basic rights with a series of screenings, events and a red-carpet protest.
French-Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani, who is serving on the jury for the top prizes with president Kristen Stewart, said as the festival kicked off Thursday that cinema was a crucial fuel for the freedom movement.
“In a country like Iran that is a dictatorship, art is not only an intellectual or philosophical thing, it’s essential, it’s like oxygen,” she said.

AL-MUKALLA: Chairman of Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council Rashad Al-Alimi has urged the US to provide the Yemeni army with seized Iranian weaponry destined for the Houthis in order to replenish its arsenal and battle the militia.

Al-Alimi said on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference that the US turned over the traffickers of the seized weapons to the Yemeni authorities along with just a handful of rifles as evidence during the trials.

DAMASCUS: Israeli airstrikes targeted a residential neighborhood in central Damascus early Sunday, Syrian state news reported.
Syrian state media agency SANA, citing a source in the Damascus police command, reported that an unspecified number of people had been killed and wounded.
Loud explosions were heard over the capital around 12:30 a.m. local time, and SANA reported that Syrian air defenses were “confronting hostile targets in the sky around Damascus.”