Hearings in the $1 billion lawsuit filed by auto tycoon Carlos Ghosn against Nissan and other defendants have started in Beirut with lawyers of both sides meeting the judge in charge of the case, judicial officials said.

The former Nissan CEO filed the case against Nissan in May in Beirut, alleging he was detained in Japan in 2018 on false charges because of what he calls the automaker's disinformation against him. The 69-year-old Ghosn is seeking half of the $1 billion in damages and half for compensation including salary, retirement funds and stock options.

A truck dumps another load of black sunflower seeds into the barn of Ukrainian farmer Oleksandr Ryabinin, where they scatter over the floor, releasing a nutty aroma when crunched underfoot.

World leaders meet Monday at the United Nations in a bid to salvage ambitious promises to lift the planet's poorest, at a time when vulnerable nations are facing a volley of crises.

France will lift a ban on below-cost sales to bring down fuel prices, Finance and Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said Monday, hoping to soothe consumers' inflation anxieties.

With a draft law set for debate in October, "I hope it will come into force from the beginning of December," Le Maire told broadcaster France 2.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on Elon Musk, the head of electric carmaker Tesla, to establish a factory in Turkey during a meeting in New York, Erdogan's office said Monday.

Erdogan, who is in the U.S. to attend the U.N. General Assembly, also discussed potential cooperation between Musk's space exploration firm SpaceX and Turkey's space program, the Turkish president's office said.

Frozen funds totalling $6 billion have been transferred to Qatari banks under a U.S.-Iran prisoner swap deal, with a plane on standby in Tehran to fly out five American detainees, a source told AFP on Monday.

The release of the funds by U.S. ally South Korea, long blocked under sanctions, is the key condition for the exchange of five Americans detained in Iran and, according to Tehran, five Iranians held in the United States.

Two cargo ships arrived in one of Ukraine's ports over the weekend, using a temporary Black Sea corridor established by Kyiv following Russia's withdrawal from a wartime agreement designed to ensure safe grain exports from the invaded country's ports.

Two Palau-flagged bulk carriers, Aroyat and Resilient Africa, docked Saturday at the seaport of Chornomorsk in the southern Odesa region, according to an online statement by the Ukrainian Sea Ports Authority. The vessels are the first civilian cargo ships to reach one of the Odesa ports since Russia exited the grain deal.

Four years after Lebanon's historic meltdown began, the small nation is still facing "enormous economic challenges," with a collapsed banking sector, eroding public services, deteriorating infrastructure and worsening poverty, the International Monetary Fund warned Friday.

In a statement issued at the end of a four-day visit by an IMF delegation to the crisis-hit country, the international agency welcomed recent policy decisions by Lebanon's central bank to stop lending to the state and end the work in an exchange platform known as Sayrafa.

European regulators slapped TikTok with a $368 million fine on Friday for failing to protect children's privacy, the first time that the popular short video-sharing app has been punished for breaching Europe's strict data privacy rules.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission, the lead privacy regulator for Big Tech companies whose European headquarters are largely in Dublin, said it was fining TikTok 345 million euros and reprimanding the platform for the violations dating to the second half of 2020.

The Central Bank of Russia raised its key lending rate by one percentage point to 13% on Friday, a month after imposing an even larger hike, as concerns about inflation persist and the ruble continues to struggle against the dollar.

The increase comes as annualized inflation rose in September to 5.5% and the bank said it expected it would reach 6%-7% by the end of the year.