NEW YORK: After being arrested for creating antigovernment propaganda in 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was banned from making films for 20 years. Since then, he’s made five widely acclaimed features.
His latest, “No Bears,” opens soon in US theaters while Panahi is in prison.
In July, Panahi went to the Tehran prosecutor’s office to inquire about the arrest of Mohammad Rasoulof, a filmmaker detained in the government’s crackdown on protests. Panahi himself was arrested and, on a decade-old charge, sentenced to six years in jail.

ANKARA: Sweden’s Supreme Court decision to block the extradition of Turkish journalist Bulent Kenes is a “very negative” development, Turkiye’s foreign minister said on Tuesday, as Stockholm seeks Ankara’s approval for it to join NATO.

Mevlut Cavusoglu was speaking at a news conference in Ankara. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last month singled out Kenes as a person Ankara wants extradited from Sweden as a condition for Ankara’s approval for Stockholm to join NATO.

TUNIS: The Tunisian government has raised the price of drinking water by up to 23 percent, the official gazette said on Tuesday, as the country seeks to reduce subsidies to qualify for IMF help.

Tunisia, which has a shortage of water after years of drought, is under pressure from the International Monetary Fund to cut government subsidies, including of energy, food and water, to qualify for a recovery package the country needs to save public finances from collapse.

QAMISHLI, Syria: Baran Ramadan Mesko had been hiding with other migrants for weeks in the coastal Algerian city of Oran, awaiting a chance to take a boat across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.
Days before the 38-year-old Syrian Kurd was to begin the journey, he received news that a smuggler boat carrying some of his friends had sunk soon after leaving the Algerian coast. Most of its passengers had drowned.
It came as a shock, after spending weeks to get to Algeria from Syria and then waiting for a month for a smuggler to put him on the boat.

BEIRUT: Lebanon is fast running out of medicines and infant formula, with deliveries at a standstill and supplies expected to run out within days, the head of the country’s pharmacists’ syndicate has warned.

Joe Salloum said that the exchange rate crisis has led to an almost complete cessation of medicine and infant formula deliveries to pharmacies.