Middle East & North Africa

ANKARA, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday that the next contact with the Syrian government as part of a road map for dialogue between the two countries will be between the foreign ministers.

The foreign ministers' meeting will be the second stage of the contact after defense ministers of Russia, Türkiye and Syria met in Moscow on Wednesday for normalization between Türkiye and Syria in the decade-long Syrian war, Cavusoglu told reporters at a press briefing in the capital Ankara.

JERUSALEM (AP) — After five elections that have paralyzed Israeli politics for nearly four years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has finally returned to power with the government he has long coveted: a parliamentary majority of religious and far-right lawmakers who share his hard-line views toward the Palestinians and hostility toward Israel’s legal system.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn into office Thursday, taking the helm of the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in Israel’s history and vowing to enact policies that could cause domestic and regional turmoil and alienate the country’s closest allies.

Netanyahu took the oath of office moments after parliament passed a vote of confidence in his new government. His return marks his sixth term in office, continuing his more than decade-long dominance over Israeli politics.

28 Dec 2022; MEMO: Qatar announced yesterday that it had recycled about 80 per cent of the waste from the stadiums that hosted the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, Anadolu reported.

In a statement, the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy (SC), which is responsible for the delivery of the required infrastructure to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, revealed that more than 2,000 tonnes of waste was generated during the tournament, which were recycled or converted into organic fertiliser.

28 Dec 2022; MEMO: The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem has strongly condemned the storming of its land by an Israeli radical group in Wadi Hilweh in Silwan, south of the Old City of Jerusalem.

28 Dec 2022; MEMO: The Israeli Army Chief of Staff, Aviv Kochavi, said yesterday that his forces had improved their readiness to strike Iranian nuclear targets.

Speaking at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies, Kochavi said: "The level of preparedness for an operation in Iran has dramatically improved."

"If the army is ordered to act against the Iranian nuclear program, it will accomplish the mission assigned to it," he added.

28 Dec 2022; MEMO: Israeli settlers today fenced off a plot of land in the village of Khirbet As-Samra, based in the northern Jordan Valley, reported Wafa news agency.

Local residents told Wafa that the settlers barged into the village, where they installed barbed wire around a plot of land in preparation for seizing it and set up an illegal settlement outpost.

28 Dec 2022; MEMO: The former head of Saudi Arabia's Public Security agency has reportedly been sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment, in one of the latest anti-corruption cases ruled on in the kingdom.

According to Prisoners of Conscience, a Twitter account which tracks and observes the situation of Saudi detainees, Lieutenant General Khaled Bin Qarar Al-Harbi was handed a sentence of 25 years in prison on charges of corruption and abuse of power.

29 Dec 2022; MEMO: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday received the credentials of new ambassadors from four countries, including Israel.

At the presidential complex in the capital Ankara, Erdogan welcomed Israeli Ambassador Irit Lillian, marking the first appointment by Tel Aviv since 2018.

Senior diplomat Lillian, whose appointment was announced on Sept. 19, had served as Israel's charge d'affaires in Ankara for the past two years.

28 Dec 2022; MEMO: Germany said on Wednesday that it sees no reason to revive the stalled talks on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

"From our point of view, there are currently no indications or reasons for a resumption of the Iran nuclear negotiations," Foreign Ministry spokesman Christofer Burger told media representatives in Berlin.

Germany has repeatedly made it clear that "these negotiations are not taking place at the moment," he added.