SHUBRA BELOULA, Egypt: The village of Shubra Beloula on the Nile Delta is at the heart of the jasmine industry in Egypt, which along with India is one of the world’s top two producers.

The fragrant flower is the village’s main economic activity and source of income, employing most of the population of about 15,000 during the harvesting season between June and September.

In fields outside the village, workers walk along rows of bushes in the relative cool of the night and early morning, using headtorches to pick flowers by hand into baskets.

JUBA: More than 50,000 fighters including former rebels from rival camps in South Sudan’s civil war were set to be integrated into the country’s army in a long-overdue graduation ceremony on Tuesday.

The unification of forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and his rival, Vice President Riek Machar, was a key condition of the 2018 peace deal that ended the brutal five-year conflict in which nearly 40,000 people died.

JERUSALEM: A state commission of inquiry into one of Israel’s worst civil disasters issued a warning to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a senior police official on Tuesday that they may share responsibility for an accident that killed 45 people.

The committee investigated the circumstances of the disaster in which a crowd of thousands of visitors at a religious festival in northern Israel last year created a deadly stampede and crush in a narrow passageway.

BEIRUT: Saudi Arabia is seeking the arrest and extradition from Lebanon of a Saudi man who threatened the Kingdom’s embassy in Beirut, the Saudi ambassador to Lebanon said on Tuesday.

“We call upon the competent Lebanese authorities to undertake the necessary legal procedures regarding the terrorist threats,” Waleed Bukhari said after a meeting with Lebanon’s interior minister.

AL-MUKALLA: The internationally recognized government of Yemen accused the Houthis on Monday of attempting to tighten their siege on the southern city of Taiz by launching a deadly attack on the only road connecting it with other cities, as it reiterated its calls for the UN Yemen envoy and the international community to exert serious pressure on the militia to stop the attacks.