Top officials and ministers in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have recently posted about friendship and unity on social media, signaling a rapprochement months after a public fall-out between the two largest Arab economies.

A French modelling scout with close ties to the late U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein has been found dead at his home outside Paris, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Crowds of supporters of India's online "cockroach" movement grew on Wednesday at a New Delhi protest site, with their campaign for accountability and reform following examination scandals getting a boost inside parliament from opposition lawmakers.

Japanese cities are experiencing "cruelly hot days", a new meteorological term devised this year to warn people of intense heat above 40C, with emergency officials describing the soaring temperatures on Wednesday as "a disaster".

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he will meet U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Manila on Thursday for talks set to focus on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Southampton manager Tonda Eckert has been charged by the Football Association over the spying scandal that led to his side being kicked out of the Championship play-offs.

German authorities said Wednesday they were giving the green light to a controversial French-Russian nuclear project which critics fear will enable spying and sabotage by Moscow.

A new round of U.S.-mediated talks between Israel and Lebanon will be held in Italy on August 4, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Wednesday.

"We will host another session of dialogue on August 4," Tajani told parliament, following a round of talks between delegations from the two countries in Rome last week.

Austria opened a new police station in Adolf Hitler's former house on Wednesday, in the hope of deterring today's ascendant far-right extremists from making the pilgrimage to the Nazi dictator's birthplace.

Lebanon is working towards a "complete Israeli withdrawal" from areas it occupies, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said on Wednesday on a visit to a village where Lebanon's army recently deployed.

"We will continue mobilizing our political and diplomatic efforts to secure a complete Israeli withdrawal from the south," he said in Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, one of several "pilot zones" intended to demonstrate that the Lebanese Army can remove and disarm Hezbollah as part of a Washington-sponsored deal with Israel.