Despite a government ban on large gatherings to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, scores of demonstrators protested outside the Moroccan Parliament to denounce Arab countries agreeing o normalize ties with Israel.

Israel on Tuesday signed historic diplomatic pacts with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in a U.S.-brokered deal. Morocco was reported to be among other Arab countries considering a similar move, though the prime minister rejected the idea last month.

A presidential campaign that was already tugging at the nation's most searing divides has been jolted by the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, potentially reshaping the election at a moment when some Americans were beginning to cast ballots.

For months, the contest has largely centered on President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus, the biggest public health crisis in a century that has badly damaged his prospects for reelection as the U.S. death toll nears 200,000 people.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a towering women's rights champion who became the court's second female justice, died Friday at her home in Washington. She was 87.

Ginsburg died of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, the court said.

Mohammed Sufian did not dream of much: a job, food on the table, the chance to buy his 2½-year-old son the little things a toddler wants.

So when he heard that smugglers were taking people from his hometown of Tripoli to the nearby Mediterranean island of Cyprus, he decided to take the chance with his pregnant wife and child. To pay their way, he sold his furniture and two of his sister's bracelets.

A prominent Lebanese footballer has died of a bullet wound sustained last month during a funeral for one of the victims of the Beirut port blast, his club said Friday.

Mohamed Atwi, 32, played as a midfielder for a number of Lebanese clubs and won the national league three times with Beirut's Ansar, his club for almost a decade.

An Israeli court on Friday charged a Palestinian woman from east Jerusalem with membership in a terrorist organization after Israel's internal security service said the Lebanese group Hizbullah had recruited her five years ago.

Yasmine Jaber was arrested in early August. The Shin Bet internal security service said she was recruited by Hizbullah operatives at a conference in 2015 and asked to recruit others in east Jerusalem. It said she traveled to Istanbul on a number of occasions to meet Hizbullah operatives and communicated with them via social media.

India’s coronavirus cases have jumped by another 96,424 infections in the past 24 hours, showing little signs of slowing down.

The Health Ministry on Friday raised the nation’s confirmed total since the pandemic began to more than 5.21 million. It said 1,174 more people died in the past 24 hours, for a total of 84,372.

Hizbullah has stored chemicals that can be used to make explosives in several European countries, a senior State Department official said Thursday as he appealed to countries in Europe and elsewhere to impose bans on the organization.

Hizbullah operatives have moved ammonium nitrate from Belgium to France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Switzerland in recent years and are suspected to still be storing the material throughout Europe, said Nathan Sales, the State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism.

Syria's oil minister claimed the severe fuel crisis that has hit his country is the result of Western sanctions, and also allegedly because oil fields in eastern regions have fallen under control of American troops and U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters.

The minister, Bassam Tomeh told state TV in an interview aired late Wednesday that oil supplies have been delayed because of the situation. "We have stocks that we are trying to manage in a rational way," he said, without elaborating.

The U.S. Treasury on Thursday imposed sanctions on two Lebanon-based companies and a man described as a Hizbullah official.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, sanctioned the companies Arch Consulting and Meamar Construction "for being owned, controlled, or directed by Hizbullah."