On Thursday, bags of Arabic bread were being sold on black market for up to LBP30,000 per bag, the National News Agency said, as stores and supermarkets in Nabatiyeh only received a scarce quantity.

Six mills had stopped operating, according to Antoine Seif, the head of the Syndicate of Bakery Owners in Mount Lebanon, as the central bank failed to pay for wheat at the silos.

Sweeping U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran have badly impacted the country's economy and worsened the humanitarian situation in the Persian Gulf nation, a United Nations special envoy said Wednesday.

According to Alena Douhan, the U.N. special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, the sanctions have affected Iran's main export groups, banks and also several companies and nationals, including some pharmaceuticals and food production.

Consumed daily by billions of people around the world in bread and other flour-based products, wheat is a basic food staple, making current record prices for the cereal a global concern. 

Low rainfall or droughts in major producing countries were already causing worries before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February sent markets soaring.

Lebanon was witnessing a host of renewed crises on Wednesday against the backdrop of a continuous surge of the dollar exchange rate on the black market.

“The flour crisis will grow and we will witness more queues outside bakeries,” Ali Ibrahim, the head of the Syndicate of Bakery Owners in Lebanon, told al-Jadeed TV, amid a shortage of Arabic bread in the market.

The central bank has extended the implementation of Circular 161 until the end of July, allowing banks to continue to purchase dollars via the Sayrafa platform, Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh announced on Wednesday.

The circular, which has been in place since January, allows commercial banks to buy U.S. dollars from the central bank with the Lebanese pounds that they or their clients have, based on an exchange rate specified by the Sayrafa platform, which is usually lower than that of the black market.

Elon Musk's ties to China through his role as electric car brand Tesla's biggest shareholder could add complexity to his bid to buy Twitter.

Other companies that want access to China give in to pressure to follow Beijing's positions on Taiwan and other issues. But Twitter is shut out by internet barriers that block most Chinese users from seeing global social media, which gives Beijing no leverage over the company, though the ruling Communist Party uses it to spread propaganda abroad.

Japan's government announced Tuesday it will begin allowing small package tours from four countries later this month before gradually opening up to foreign tourism for the first time since it imposed tight border restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Transport Minister Tetsuo Saito said the tours will be allowed from Australia, Singapore, Thailand and the United States as an experiment.

The land borders between Spain and Morocco at Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's North African enclave cities, have begun to reopen after being closed for just over two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic and later a diplomatic crisis between the two countries.

Crowds gathered at the first border to reopen — Tarajal, in Ceuta, and Beni Enzar in Melilla — to witness the reopening at midnight Monday.

The British government dramatically escalated a fight with the European Union on Tuesday by saying it will pass a law to change the trade treaty signed by the two sides less than two years ago.

Britain says its move to scrap parts of the legally binding treaty is an insurance policy in case it can't reach agreement with the bloc to end a long-running dispute over post-Brexit trade rules.

As Lebanon awaits the final results of its parliamentary elections, enormous difficulties lie ahead.

The value of the Lebanese pound dropped on Tuesday, reaching 29,500 to the U.S. dollar.