TEHRAN: Iran’s president has ordered a probe in the case of a young woman who slipped into a coma while in custody in Tehran and died, state media reported on Friday. The police have said she suffered a heart attack.
According to the state-run IRNA news agency, President Ebrahim Raisi asked Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi to “investigate the cause of the incident with urgency and special attention.”
According to reports on social media, Mahsa Amini, 22, was detained earlier this week by the so-called “morality police” after officers apparently found fault with her hijab.

ANKARA: Turkey’s intelligence chief has held multiple meetings with his Syrian counterpart in Damascus over the last few weeks, a sign of Russian efforts to encourage a thaw between states on opposite sides of Syria’s war, four sources said.
A regional source aligned with Damascus said that Hakan Fidan, head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, and Syrian intelligence chief Ali Mamlouk met as recently as this week in the Syrian capital.

AMMAN: A bloc of Arab parties has split ahead of Israel’s November elections — a move that could dilute the minority’s political influence and strengthen former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hopes of a return to power.

The Arab nationalist Balad party will run separately from the other two parties in the Joint List in the general election.

GAZA CITY: Byzantine mosaics dating from the 5th to 7th centuries were unveiled in the central Gaza Strip on Friday, after being uncovered by a farmer plowing his land.
Found in an area less than a kilometer from the often tense border with Israel, the mosaics are “in a perfect state of conservation,” said French archaeologist Rene Elter, a researcher associated with the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem whose team examined the finds.
“It’s work of excellent quality. They used materials that were certainly relatively expensive,” Elter said.

LONDON:  The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has granted the UAE cities of Sharjah and Ras Al-Khaimah membership of its Global Network of Learning Cities as the culmination of its initiatives and achievements in the field of education, Emirates News Agency reported.

The GNLC is a forum that encourages members to share ideas and learning solutions while also promoting policy dialogue and peer learning to help forge partnerships, develop capacity, and instruments to support the development of learning cities.