TEHRAN: Iran said Monday the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, will visit Tehran “in the coming days,” amid a row over uranium enrichment levels in the Islamic republic.

The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said earlier this month it was in discussions with Tehran after Bloomberg News reported that the watchdog’s inspectors in Iran had found uranium enriched to 84 percent purity.

LONDON: Iranian schoolgirls are being deliberately poisoned to keep them away from their studies, a government minister claimed in a report by the Fars News Agency.

Younes Panahi, Iran’s deputy health minister, said that “certain individuals sought the closure of all schools, especially girls’ schools,” and that pupils were being “deliberately poisoned with chemical compounds.”

In the city of Qom, hundreds of cases of respiratory poisonings have been reported since November, with 15 girls hospitalized over the past week alone.

NASIRIYAH, Iraq: Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates rivers have witnessed a sharp decrease in their levels in the south of the country, officials said Sunday, pledging to take urgent measures to ease water shortages.
In Nasiriyah, capital of the southern province of Dhi Qar, an AFP photographer saw the river bed of the mighty Euphrates dry in patches.
The water ministry blamed the situation in some southern provinces on “the low quantity of water reaching Iraq from neighboring Turkiye.”

JEDDAH: A delegation of senior Arab parliamentarians met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus on Sunday, another sign of thawing ties after more than a decade of isolation over the conflict in Syria.

The heads of the Iraqi, Jordanian, Palestinian, Libyan, Egyptian and UAE houses of representatives, as well as representatives from Oman and Lebanon, traveled to Syria as part of a delegation from the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union.

They met with Syrian parliamentarians and with Assad, according to pro-regime news agency SANA.

JERUSALEM: Scores of Israeli settlers went on a violent rampage in the northern West Bank late Sunday, setting dozens of cars and homes on fire after two settlers were killed by a Palestinian gunman. Palestinian medics said one man was killed and four others were badly wounded in what appeared to be the worst outburst of settler violence in decades.

Israelis from the Har Bracha settlement went on a rampage after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israeli brothers as they were driving in the occupied West Bank on Sunday, according to officials.