Yemen

Egypt and Saudi Arabia are considering holding joint military manoeuvres in the kingdom as the allies carry out air strikes in its neighbour Yemen, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's office said.
      
Other Gulf Arab countries would also participate, the Egyptian president's office said late Tuesday.
      

US Secretary of State John Kerry on April 15 welcomed a compromise with Congress on giving lawmakers a say on any final deal on Iran's nuclear programme.

Kerry said the measure approved April 14 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which raises the threshold for critics in Congress to block any accord with Tehran, made him "confident" ahead of a June 30 deadline.    

Russia's return to the group of leading industrialised nations hinges on its assistance to efforts to put an an end to the conflict in eastern Ukraine, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has said.

The UN Security Council will vote on April 14 on a draft resolution that demands Yemen's Huthi rebels pull back and punishes them with an arms embargo and sanctions, diplomats said.

The move by Moscow to lift an embargo on supplying Iran with S-300 air defense missile systems is "unhelpful", a Pentagon official has said.

On Sunday Russia announced it would renounce a ban on selling the equipment to Iran after substantial progress was marked in talks of world powers with Iran over the country's controversial nuclear program earlier in April.

There were two Bulgarians among the foreign nationals evacuated from war-torn Yemen by a Russian plane last night, the foreign ministry in Sofia said late on Monday .

The nationality of the Bulgarian citizens was confirmed following completion of data processing of the evacuees by the crisis centre established by the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Iran has suspended pilgrimages to the Muslim holy places in Saudi Arabia in protest at an alleged sexual assault attempt against two teenage Iranian boys, the culture minister said on April 13.

Another 10 Romanian citizens and a family member were evacuated on Sunday from Yemen, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed in a release to AGERPRES.

Photo credit: (c) Liviu SOVA / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

About 150 nationals of Russia and other countries including Bulgaria have left war-torn Yemen on board a second Russian plane on Sunday, TASS reported.

The Il-62 passenger aircraft landed at Chkalovskiy Airport near Moscow early on Sunday. This was after the second evacuation flight of a Russian plane from Yemen over the past 24 hours and the seventh one over the past two weeks.

Saudi-led air strikes hit a rebel base in central Yemen on April 12 and clashes raged in southern city Aden as France's top diplomat voiced Western support for the air campaign in Riyadh.