A gunman has shot dead prominent Jordanian writer Nahed Hattar outside a court where he was facing charges for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam.

Rebel-held areas of the northern Syrian city of Aleppo saw the heaviest air strikes in months overnight, activists say, as a week-old truce collapsed.

An air strike on a medical facility near the Syrian city of Aleppo has killed five employees of an international aid agency, the group says, including nurses.

The UN has suspended all aid convoys in Syria after its lorries were attacked by warplanes near Aleppo on Monday. 

A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who was resettled in Uruguay has slipped into a coma after a lengthy hunger strike in support of his demand to be reunited with his family in Turkey.

The United States has signed a record $38bn deal to provide Israel with military assistance over a 10-year period - the largest such agreement ever by the US with any country.

A Karachi-bound express train has collided with a stationary freight train in Pakistan's central Punjab region, killing at least six people and injuring more than 150, according to Geo TV.

Egyptian officers are asking for bribes of up to $10,000 from Palestinians in Gaza desperate to leave the besieged coastal enclave, according to Gaza brokers who coordinate the bribe payments, former Palestinian border officials and travellers.  

A suicide car bomb attack on an army training camp in Yemen's second city of Aden killed at least 45 people, medical sources say.

A boy stands shaking in the street. Fear etched across his face. Two men flank him on either side as a third rips through the boy's Barcelona football shirt to reveal what appears to be an explosive belt. 

At least 50 people have been killed and 94 more wounded in an explosion at a wedding ceremony in Turkey's southeastern province of Gaziantep, near the Syria border.

Iraq has hanged 36 men convicted over the killing of up to 1,700 military recruits at a former US base in 2014.

Almost 18,000 Syrians have died in government jails since 2011, with authorities using torture, beatings, electric shocks and rape against prisoners on a "massive scale," a rights groups has said.

At least 125 people have been killed and many more injured in an explosion claimed by the Islamic State group in Baghdad, Iraqi police say.

Triple bomb attacks claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group have killed at least 35 people and injured 24 in Yemen's south-eastern city of Mukalla.