Saudi authorities have released a princess detained in the kingdom under mysterious circumstances for nearly three years, her supporters said.

The princess, Basmah bint Saud, a daughter of Saudi Arabia's second king, disappeared in March 2019 and landed in a notorious Saudi prison without charge, she wrote on social media at the time.

Hospitals worked Monday to save the lives of multiple people gravely injured by smoke in a fire that killed 19 people, including nine children, in a Bronx apartment building.

Dozens of people were hospitalized, and as many as 13 were in critical condition after Sunday's blaze, already New York City's deadliest in three decades.

Tennis star Novak Djokovic won a court battle Monday to stay in Australia to contest the Australian Open despite being unvaccinated against COVID-19, but the government threatened to cancel his visa a second time.

Federal Circuit Court Judge Anthony Kelly reinstated Djokovic's visa, which was canceled after his arrival last week because officials decided he didn't meet the criteria for an exemption to an entry requirement that all non-citizens be fully vaccinated.

Israel's national library says the number of visitors to its Arabic website more than doubled last year, driven by a growing collection of digitized materials and an aggressive outreach campaign to the Arab world.

Around 650,000 users, predominantly from the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Algeria, visited the National Library of Israel's English and Arabic sites in 2021, said library spokesman Zack Rothbart.

Khader al-Najjar has been unable to leave the Gaza Strip since he returned to the Palestinian territory 25 years ago, not even to seek medical treatment for a spinal ailment or to bid farewell to his mother, who died in Jordan last year.

The reason: Israel refused to allow the Palestinian Authority to issue him a national ID. That made it virtually impossible to leave, even before Israel and Egypt imposed a punishing blockade when the Hamas militant group seized control of Gaza in 2007.

Two former Israeli prime ministers faced off in a Tel Aviv courtroom as Benjamin Netanyahu's defamation suit against Ehud Olmert got underway on Monday.

Netanyahu, his wife and son appeared in the Tel Aviv Magistrate's court for the opening of their case against Olmert, Netanyahu's predecessor as Israel's prime minister.

Foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states are visiting Beijing for meetings with officials from the world's second largest economy, a leading consumer of oil and source of foreign investment.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday gave no details of the agendas for the visits, but said they were expected to "deepen relations between the two sides."

Senior U.S. and Russian officials were formally launching special talks on strategic stability on Monday as part of a flurry of diplomatic activity in Europe this week aimed at defusing tensions over a Russian military buildup on the border with Ukraine.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and his delegation arrived under Swiss police escort at the U.S. diplomatic mission for face-to-face talks with Wendy Sherman, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, and her team. The meeting is part of "Strategic Security Dialogue" talks launched by Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin during a June summit in the Swiss city.

Iraq's new parliament has reelected its speaker for a second term, the first step toward forming a new government after a general election whose results have been contested by powerful Iran-backed factions.

In a reflection of tensions, the meeting was marked by disarray, with the eldest member of Parliament who was leading the session being evacuated to the hospital apparently due to the stress.

Egyptian-Palestinian human rights activist Ramy Shaath arrived in Paris and reunited with his wife on Saturday, after Egyptian authorities released him from prison and deported him.

An overjoyed Shaath, the son of a prominent Palestinian politician, walked out of the Charles de Gaulle airport smiling, holding hands with his wife, Céline Lebrun Shaath, a French national, and waving to a cheering crowd of supporters.