BAGHDAD: Iraq’s official media regulator on Tuesday ordered all media and social media companies operating in the Arab state not to use the term “homosexuality” and instead to say “sexual deviance,” a government spokesperson said and a document from the regulator shows.

The Iraqi Communications and Media Commission document said that the use of the term “gender” was also banned. It prohibited all phone and internet companies licensed by it from using the terms in any of their mobile applications.

TEHRAN: Iran executed five men by hanging on Wednesday after convicting them of gang raping a woman in the northwest of the country last year, the judiciary said.

The “five men who had kidnapped and raped a woman in the city of Marand in May 2022 were executed today (Wednesday),” the judiciary’s Mizan Online website announced.

The men, who were arrested four days after the gang rape in East Azerbaijan province, were implicated in other crimes, Mizan said without elaborating.

UNITED NATIONS: Sexual violence is being committed in Sudan on a “sickening scale,” while fighting in the Darfur region is reopening “old wounds of ethnic tension” that could engulf the country, United Nations officials told the Security Council on Wednesday.
“The alarming accounts of sexual violence that are heard from people who have fled to Port Sudan are just a fraction of those being repeated at a sickening scale from conflict hotspots across the country,” said senior UN aid official Edem Wosornu.

BEIRUT: At least two people were killed on Wednesday in clashes between armed Hezbollah fighters and Christian residents of a mountain village, after a militia truck overturned on the road between Damascus and Beirut.

Shots were fired after Hezbollah operatives who were escorting the vehicle surrounded the truck, which crashed on a downhill turn near Kahaleh, about 15km from the Lebanese capital. Security sources said one of the dead was a Hezbollah member and the other was villager Fadi Bejjani, 60.

AL-MUKALLA: The long-awaited operation to resolve the issue of the ageing tanker SFO Safer, currently decaying off the coast of Yemen, is set to end in the coming days, with over 96 percent of the ship’s oil cargo transferred to a replacement tanker, the Yemeni government said on Wednesday.