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Photo Credit: AFP

"Come and see!" shouted an overjoyed French researcher recently at a desert dig in Larsa, southern Iraq, where the team had unearthed a 4,000-year-old cuneiform inscription.

"When you find inscriptions like that, in situ, it's moving," said Dominique Charpin, professor of Mesopotamian civilisation at the College de France in Paris.

The inscription in Sumerian was engraved on a brick fired in the 19th century BC.

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Photo Credit: Getty Image

Princess Basma bint Saud was detained in March 2019 as she prepared to fly to Switzerland for medical treatment.

It is not known why she was detained, and neither she nor her daughter Suhoud were charged with any crime.

Some have speculated it may have been related to her advocacy on humanitarian issues and constitutional reform.

Her family told the United Nations in a written statement in 2020 that it was likely due in large part to her "record as an outspoken critic of abuses", news agency AFP reports.

Other supporters suggest it was her close links to former crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who is reported to have been placed under house arrest.

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Photo Credit:Getty Images

A team of Afghan intelligence agents poured around 3 000 litres of liquor into a canal in Kabul, the country's spy agency said on Sunday, as the new Taliban authorities crack down on the sale of alcohol.

Video footage released by the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) showed its agents pouring alcohol stored in barrels into the canal after seizing it during a raid in the capital.

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Sunday that Israel would offer a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine to people over 60 and to medical staff as it faces a surge in Omicron variant infections.

Israel last week approved a fourth dose of the vaccine developed by Pfizer (PFE.N) and BioNTech (22UAy.DE), a second booster, for people who are immune-compromised and the elderly living in care homes.

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Photo Credit :Reuters

WASHINGTON/BERLIN, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Top U.S. and Russian officials for Iran have met in Vienna, a Russian envoy said on Wednesday, and delegates on both sides said Moscow and Washington were coordinating in a bid to salvage the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia's envoy to talkson the nuclear pact, wrote on Twitter that he had met twice on Wednesday with the U.S. special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, posting pictures of himself and the U.S. diplomat sitting across from a long table.

The State Department, when asked about the meeting, said it does not discuss the details of diplomatic conversations.

"Close consultations and coordination between the Russian and the U.S. delegations in the course of the Vienna talks constitute an important prerequisite for progress towards restoration of the JCPOA," he wrote, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal.

"We maintain intensive and, I believe, useful dialogue in the course of the #ViennaTalks on concrete way and means of restoration of the #JCPOA," Ulyanov tweeted, after what he said was his second meeting with Malley.

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