Kuwait offered Egypt on Wednesday an aid package of $4 billion, a minister said, bringing to $12 billion the total pledges by Gulf monarchies to Cairo since the army ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi last week.

"The council of ministers has approved an urgent aid package to our brothers in Egypt following instructions from the emir," State Minister for Cabinet Affairs Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah al-Sabbah said, according to the official KUNA news agency.

France's medical order has sanctioned nutritionist Pierre Dukan, whose high-protein diet has seen him sell millions of books and win over a slew of famous followers, for having prescribed a slimming drug linked to hundreds of deaths.

Dukan, whose diet was reportedly used by the Middleton family ahead of Kate's 2011 wedding to Britain's Prince William, was sanctioned for having prescribed the anti-diabetes drug Mediator to a female patient in 1971, his lawyer Edouard de Lamaze said.

Irish lawmakers are set to introduce abortion in limited cases where the mother's life is at risk, when controversial new laws go to a final vote Wednesday night.

The predominantly Catholic nation's abortion laws faced global scrutiny after the death of 31-year-old Indian woman Savita Halappanavar in a Galway hospital last October.

Activists in Aleppo have held protests calling for the lifting of a rebel siege of regime-held districts of Syria's second city that has created food shortages, a watchdog said on Wednesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the first demonstration calling for the siege to be lifted came on Tuesday, adding that one protester was shot dead.

Islamic extremists fighting in Syria pose one of the most worrying threats to Britain and its allies, particularly if they gain access to the regime's stocks of chemical weapons, parliament's intelligence committee said on Wednesday.

In their annual report, lawmakers said the consequences of Al-Qaeda-linked extremists getting hold of President Bashar Assad's reported stocks of the sarin and VX nerve agents, ricin and mustard gas would be "catastrophic".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned on Wednesday an assault on an ultra-Orthodox soldier by coreligionists in a religious neighborhood of Jerusalem, vowing a tough line against anyone threatening army personnel.

"We will crack down on anyone who tries to terrorize civilians who are fulfilling their duty to the state," he said, following the incident on Tuesday night, which saw a soldier forced to hide in a building in Mea Shearim after a group of ultra-Orthodox hurled stones at him.

The former chief of Sudan's powerful intelligence service, who faced a possible death sentence for his alleged role in a coup plot, was freed under an amnesty on Wednesday, his lawyer said.

Salah Gosh "was released because of the amnesty given by President Bashir to all those who participated in the coup," Nabeel Adeeb told Agence France Presse.

A military court on Wednesday postponed until next week a bail application by Islamist cleric Abu Qatada, who faces terror charges in Jordan following his deportation from Britain, his lawyer said.

"The state security court today postponed until next week its decision to look into my request to release Abu Qatada on bail," Taysir Diab told Agence France Presse.

The Turkish central bank sold $200 million dollars on Wednesday, market sources said, in a renewed fight to hold up the value of the lira.

The central bank has been selling dollars since Monday when it announced urgent and "strong" action to defend the currency and contain overheated bank lending.

Egypt's public prosecutor on Wednesday ordered the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood supreme guide Mohammed Badie and other top leaders of the movement for allegedly inciting violence that left dozens dead, judicial sources said.

At least 51 people were killed in clashes Monday outside the Republican Guard headquarters in Cairo where supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi were calling for him to be reinstated.