Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard on Tuesday fired cruise missiles during a major military exercise across the country's south, media reported.

The semiofficial Tasnim news agency, believed to be close to the Guard, did not specify the type and range of the missiles. But it said five cruise missiles and an unspecified number of attack drones successfully hit their targets.

Israel's former military intelligence chief says Israel was involved in the American airstrike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. It is the first public acknowledgement of Israel's role in the operation.

Soleimani headed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's elite Quds Force and helped orchestrate Iran's involvement with paramilitary groups abroad. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike at the Baghdad airport in January 2020, an incident that threatened to pull the countries into full-blown conflict.

The U.N. chief, who is visiting Lebanon, has called for an impartial and transparent investigation into last year's massive Beirut port explosion to ensure justice.

The Aug. 4, 2020 blast has been described as one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in the world. It devastated parts of the Lebanese capital, killing at least 216 people and injuring thousands.

Iran's top diplomat to Yemen died on Tuesday after reportedly contracting the coronavirus, Iranian state TV said, just days after he was abruptly recalled from his mission in the war-torn nation.

State-run media in Iran said Ambassador Hassan Irloo had become infected with the coronavirus in Yemen, where a conflict between Iran-backed Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led military coalition has raged for six years. Authorities said he was flown out of the country for urgent medical treatment in Iran over the weekend.

The governor of a central Philippine province devastated by Typhoon Rai last week pleaded on radio Tuesday for the government to quickly send food and other aid, warning that without outside help, army troops and police forces would have to be deployed to prevent looting amid growing hunger.

Governor Arthur Yap of Bohol province said he could no longer secure rice and other food aid after his contingency fund ran out and added that many of the 1.2 million people in his island province, which remained without power and cellphone service five days after the typhoon struck, have become increasingly desperate.

A Japanese billionaire, his producer and a Russian cosmonaut safely returned to Earth on Monday after spending 12 days on the International Space Station.

Fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa, his producer Yozo Hirano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin made a soft landing in a Russian Soyuz capsule in the steppes of Kazakhstan at 9:13 a.m. (0313 GMT) about 150 kilometers ( 90 miles) southeast of the city of Zhezkazgan.

A two-tonne rubber whale can take on a life of its own in the frigid shallows of a windswept New Zealand beach, particularly when a bedraggled group of would-be rescuers is trying to wrestle it into a harness.

"Keep the blowhole clear... you're too close to the tail, one swipe can do a serious injury to yourself and the whale," an instructor yells as the Wellington rain lashes his pupils.

YouTube TV began restoring access to Disney content after a dispute between the companies led to an interruption of service over the weekend.

YouTube told viewers Sunday they were restoring service so customers could once again watch networks provided by Disney such as ESPN, FX, National Geographic and local ABC stations.

Former leftist student leader Gabriel Boric will be under quick pressure from his youthful supporters to fulfill his promises to remake Chile after the millennial politician scored a historic victory in the country's presidential runoff election.

Boric spent months traversing Chile, vowing to bring a youth-led inclusive government to attack nagging poverty and inequality that he said are the unacceptable underbelly of a free market model imposed decades ago by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Leaders of Bulgaria and Greece on Monday discussed bilateral cooperation in the energy sector, with an emphasis on reducing their reliance on Russian gas through the speedy completion of a key gas interconnector linking the neighboring countries.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis who is the first European leader to visit Bulgaria since the formation of a new government there, met with his Bulgarian counterpart, Kiril Petkov, and the country's president, Rumen Radev.