AL-MUKALLA: Four Yemeni army soldiers were killed and 17 more wounded in the latest wave of Houthi attacks in three days, Yemen’s Defense Ministry said, adding a further blow to the UN-brokered truce.

The ministry said that the Houthis violated the truce 288 times on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in former flaring battlefields across the country.

It added that Yemeni forces pushed back many attempts by the Houthis to seize control of new areas and came under drone and missile attacks by the Houthis in the provinces of Hodeidah, Taiz, Marib, Hajjah, Jouf and Dhale.

TANGIERS, Morocco: Four women have pressed charges in Morocco against French insurance tycoon Jacques Bouthier, currently under arrest in Paris on charges of raping a minor, a rights group said Friday.
Bouthier is accused of various acts of “people trafficking, sexual harassment and verbal and moral violence,” between 2018 and this year, said Karima Salama, a lawyer from the Moroccan Association for the Rights of Victims (AMDV).

CAIRO: A building collapse early on Friday in the Egyptian capital of Cairo killed six people, authorities said, as rescuers at the scene searched through the rubble. It was not immediately known what caused the collapse.
The city’s deputy governor, Ibrahim Abdel-Hadi, said in a statement released by the Interior Ministry that one family of six was believed to have been inside the six-story building in the El-Waily neighborhood when it gave way in the early hours of the morning.
He said workers were continuing to search through in the rubble.

CAIRO: A “disappointing” fortnight of UN talks in Bonn has left much work to be done just five months before a crucial climate summit, diplomats and analysts said, after negotiations failed to make concrete advances on efforts to tackle global warming.

IRBIL, Iraq: Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government is working to establish two oil firms, the latest move in the battle between Irbil and Baghdad to control the oil sector in the semi-autonomous region.

The KRG’s new oil firm KROC would specialize in oil exploration, while the second — KOMO — would focus on oil exports and marketing from the semi-autonomous region, a spokesperson said in a statement on Friday.

The regional government has presented the idea and discussed it with the federal government in Baghdad recently, the KRG spokesperson said in a statement.