The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi group in Yemen said it intercepted six explosive drones fired towards the kingdom on Friday, with the Houthis claiming to have launched attacks into southern Saudi Arabia since dawn.
This week's surprise decision by Saudi Arabia and other top oil producers to broadly stick with output cuts despite rising crude prices was influenced by events in an unexpected place - Italy.
Iran will soon present a "constructive" plan of action, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Friday, after European sources said Tehran gave positive signs about opening informal talks about its nuclear programme.
Washington denied on Friday that it was considering imposing sanctions on Lebanon's veteran central bank governor Riad Salameh, whose role in the country's financial turmoil has come under fresh scrutiny.
Pope Francis began his most risky foreign trip on Friday, flying into Iraq amid the tightest security ever seen for a papal visit to appeal to the country's leaders and people to end militant violence and religious strife.
Turkey's pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) said on Friday it would keep campaigning under a different banner if a court outlawed its current organisation over alleged links to militants.
Niger police have seized a record 17 tonnes of cannabis resin worth around $37 million in a shipment originating in Lebanon and bound for Libya, the spokesman for the West African nation's anti-drugs trafficking agency said on Friday.
At least a dozen people and possibly up to 23 have been killed in Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan province where Revolutionary Guards and security forces have used lethal force against fuel couriers from ethnic minorities and protesters, the United Nations said on Friday.
Vice President Kamala Harris, in a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, reaffirmed U.S. opposition to an International Criminal Court probe of possible war crimes in the Palestinian Territories, the White House said.
U.S. President Joe Biden's refusal to offer upfront sanctions relief to Iran may have angered Tehran's clerical rulers but it has won some praise at home despite his failure so far to draw Iran into nuclear talks or deter attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.