BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Prime Minister-designate Najib Mikati has launched a new attempt to form a  government and end the political deadlock that has gripped the country for months.

After meeting President Michel Aoun on Wednesday, Mikati said: “I presented Aoun with a proposal for the government formation on June 29. We discussed it again today and I can tell you we are starting to see eye to eye.”

RAMALLAH: Young Palestinians have the potential to play a vital role in politics but lack the opportunity to do so, according to the results of a recent poll.

The study, by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, found that young people were reluctant to join political parties, despite more than 82 percent of respondents believing they had an important role to play.

HUWAIZAH MARSHES, Iraq: To feed and cool his buffaloes, Hashem Gassed must cross 10 kilometers (6 miles) of sunburnt land in southern Iraq, where drought is devastating swaths of the mythical Mesopotamian Marshes.

The reputed home of the biblical Garden of Eden, Iraq’s swamplands have been battered by three years of drought and low rainfall, as well as reduced water flows along rivers and tributaries originating in neighboring Turkey and Iran.

RABAT: A bus crash east of Morocco’s economic capital Casablanca on Wednesday left 23 people dead, a health official said, marking one of the deadliest such accidents in recent years.
The bus overturned on a bend of a motorway in Khouribga province in the morning, local authorities said, giving an initial toll of 15 dead.
Regional health director Rochdi Kaddar later revised the death toll up to 23, telling AFP that another 36 people were injured in the crash.

BERLIN: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas expressed no regret Tuesday for the deadly attack by Palestinian militants on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics a half century ago, countering that Israel had committed “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians over the years.
Eleven Israeli athletes and a German police officer died after members of the Palestinian militant group Black September took hostages at the Olympic Village on Sept. 5, 1972. At the time of the attack, the group was linked to Abbas’ Fatah party.