A leading Syrian opposition group slammed international talks yesterday in Lausanne aimed at ending the five-year war, as warplanes pressed fierce raids on second city Aleppo.

Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza could contain two previously unknown “cavities”, scientists using radiography to scan the millennia-old monument said yesterday.

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has defended what he described as “tough but unavoidable” reforms ahead of a $12bn International Monetary Fund loan to revive his country’s ailing economy.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Iran-backed Houthi movement in Yemen attacked a funeral there after receiving incorrect information from Yemeni military figures that armed Houthi leaders were in the area, an investigative body set up by the coalition said on Saturday.

An Omani aircraft landed in the rebel-held Yemeni capital on Saturday to evacuate 115 of the most seriously wounded from a Saudi-led coalition strike on a funeral last weekend, a rebel official said.

A suicide bomber detonated an explosive vest in the middle of a Shia gathering in Baghdad, killing at least 31 people and wounding about 30 on Saturday, police and medics said.

Child brides in Turkey are often raped, beaten and forced to undergo virginity tests, according to the director of a new documentary which aims to break the silence on the taboo issue.

The United States yesterday called for immediate action to salvage the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the Security Council weighed its next steps to revive peace prospects.

Dozens of Jordanians took to the streets of Amman yesterday, protesting against a recent deal to import gas from Israel, the independent Jordanian Al-Ghad newspaper reported online.

Syrian pro-government forces used intense air strikes as cover for an advance in the battleground city of Aleppo yesterday, ahead of fresh diplomatic efforts to end the country’s intractable conflict.

An explosion killed at least four people and wounded 12 as they attended a condolences meeting in the Yemeni city of Marib, east of the capital Sanaa, local officials said.

A Saudi soldier was killed on Friday when Yemen's Houthi group attacked across the border into the kingdom's southern Jizan province, state television al-Ekhbariya reported.