Hundreds of animals, including elephants and endangered Grevy's zebras, have died in Kenyan widlife preserves during East Africa's worst drought in decades, according to a report released Friday.

The Kenya Wildlife Service and other bodies counted the deaths of 205 elephants, 512 wildebeests, 381 common zebras, 51 buffalos, 49 Grevy's zebras and 12 giraffes in the past nine months, the report states.

President Joe Biden has told supporters "we're gonna free Iran" after audience members appeared to call on him to address the ongoing protests that have spread through that country in the aftermath of the death of a young woman in the custody of its security forces.

"Don't worry, we're gonna free Iran," Biden said in an aside during a campaign rally for Democratic Rep. Mike Levin. He added, "They're gonna free themselves pretty soon."

Iran on Friday marked the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran as its theocracy faces nationwide protests after the death of a 22-year-old woman earlier arrested by the country's morality police.

Iranian state-run television aired live feeds of various counterprotests around the country, with some in Tehran waving placards of the triangle-shaped Iranian drones Russia now uses to strike targets in its war on Ukraine. But while crowds in Tehran looked large with chador-wearing women waving the Islamic Republic's flag, other protests in the country appeared smaller, with only a few dozen people taking part.

Shadia Ahmed panicked as rainwater flooded her shack one night, drenching her seven children. The next morning, the kids were seized by vomiting, diarrhea and other symptoms.

After an aid group administered tests for cholera in Ahmed's Syrian refugee encampment in the northern Lebanese town of Bhanine, her youngest, 4-year-old Assil, tested positive.

The U.S. has imposed sanctions on a group of individuals, firms and vessels connected to an oil smuggling outfit said to benefit Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

More than a dozen companies, six individuals and 11 vessels flagged from around the world — from Djibouti to Panama — are included in the sanctions package, for allegedly participating in a scheme that included blending and exporting sanctioned Iranian oil.

Lebanon is unable to put its new exchange rate into effect after its outgoing president declared the state budget unconstitutional and refused to sign off on it, officials said.

The Finance Ministry in late September announced that Lebanon would change its pegged exchange rate to the dollar from 1,500 pounds to 15,000 starting Nov. 1, which they called a "necessary corrective action." Parliament passed the cash-strapped country's 2022 national budget in September, which included the amended rate. However, it took at least another week of bureaucracy before reaching President Michel Aoun's office.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Chinese leaders in Beijing on Friday that Berlin expected equal treatment on trade as he tried to drum up greater economic cooperation despite growing distrust of the Asian superpower in the West.

Scholz is under pressure to push Beijing to get tough on Russia over the war in Ukraine, and he said Friday that Germany and China had agreed they both opposed any use of nuclear weapons in the conflict.

An ancient Christian monastery possibly dating as far back as the years before Islam spread across the Arabian Peninsula has been discovered on an island off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, officials announced Thursday.

The monastery on Siniyah Island, part of the sand-dune sheikhdom of Umm al-Quwain, sheds new light on the history of early Christianity along the shores of the Persian Gulf. It marks the second such monastery found in the Emirates, dating back as many as 1,400 years — long before its desert expanses gave birth to a thriving oil industry that led to a unified nation home to the high-rise towers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

In the middle of the concrete jungle that is Argentina's bustling capital, a huge mural has emerged of Diego Maradona wearing a national team jersey, his right hand in a fist and a defiant expression on his face.

The massive artwork, 148 feet high and 131 feet wide (45 meters by 40 meters) and painted on the side of a 14-story building in Buenos Aires, is one of several tributes that Argentines have dedicated to their soccer "God" shortly before the start of this year's World Cup in Qatar, the first since Maradona's death on Nov. 25, 2020.

Not long after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, soldiers broke down the office door of Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov. They put a bag over his head, bundled him into a car and drove him around the southern city for hours, threatening to kill him.

Fedorov, 34, is one of over 50 local leaders who have been held in Russian captivity since the war began on Feb. 24 in an attempt to subdue cities and towns coming under Moscow's control. Like many others, he said he was pressured to collaborate with the invaders.