MOSCOW: Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani met with Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday, and discussed bilateral relations and international issues.
During the Qatari official’s visit to Moscow, both parties discussed major issues, especially the latest developments in the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, the Iranian nuclear file, and developments in Palestine, Yemen and Syria.

DUBAI: The rate of achieving gender equality has returned to pre-pandemic levels, but the pace of progress has slowed, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender Gap Report.

The report found that the overall gender gap has closed by 0.3 percentage points compared to last year. It is expected that parity would only be achieved in the year 2154, the same forecast made by the WEF in its 2022 report.

The progress was partly due to improved education, with 117 out of 146 indexed countries now having closed at least 95 percent of the gap.

Egypt’s Environment Minister Yasmine Fouad on Thursday witnessed a practical training session in the city of Hurghada to study the behavior of sharks on the country’s Red Sea coast.

The Nature Protection Sector team was taking part in a two-day session, described as the first of its kind in the entire Red Sea region.

Julia Spaet, an international expert specializing in the field, is supervising the program.

Fouad said that the course aims to train the team on installing monitoring devices and sensors to monitor shark behavior.

AMMAN: Jordan has condemned Israel’s announcement it will build 1,000 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank, calling it the latest affront to Palestinians amid a spiral of violence.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the plan a day after two Palestinian gunmen killed four people near the illegal settlement of Eli, in what Hamas said was a reprisal for raids by Israeli forces and settler attacks on Palestinians.

BEIRUT: Soaring numbers of children, some as young as six, are being sent to find work in Lebanon as families struggle to afford even the basics during a spiraling economic crisis, a UN report says.
Ninety percent of households do not have enough money to buy essentials even after cutting back on other spending during what is now four years of economic meltdown, said the yearly survey by the UN’s agency for children UNICEF.