Israel fired a Patriot missile at an unmanned aircraft that approached the country's border from Syria for the second time this week, the military said Friday.

The defense system was fired at a Syrian drone "flying over the demilitarized zone," adding that it was "most likely intercepted," the military said.

When President Donald Trump meets Russia's Vladimir Putin on Monday, the Syrian conflict will be one of the most immediately pressing issues on a wide-ranging agenda.

As fighting wanes after seven years of war, the U.S. has made curtailing Iran's influence in post-war Syria a strategic objective — one strongly backed by Israel. And U.S. and Russian officials have signaled that a broad framework for such a deal is likely to be the main outcome of the summit.

A top U.S. official focused on sanctions against Iran linked American financial pressure on Tehran with ongoing economic protests roiling the country, saying she hoped the strain would limit the Islamic Republic's "malign activities" across the Mideast.

Sigal P. Mandelker, the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the U.S. Treasury, declined to comment Thursday when ask if the Trump administration hoped that tightening of the sanctions would spark the Iranian government's overthrow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has received the Iranian leader's top adviser hours after conferring with the Israeli prime minister about Iran's presence in Syria.

The Kremlin said Thursday that Putin has met with Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but wouldn't offer any details of the talks. Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that Velayati handed Putin letters from Khamenei and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Egypt hiked the prices of cigarettes on Thursday, the latest measure amid reforms designed to overhaul the country's troubled economy still reeling from a costly 2011 uprising.

The announcement was made by the chairman of Egypt's top cigarette manufacturer in a televised interview late Wednesday. Mohamed Haroun, Eastern Tobacco Company chairman, said his company will impose an increase of 1.5-3 Egyptian pounds, or about 8-17 cents, per pack of smokes.

Global stock markets mostly rose Monday as the British government appeared to turn toward a more trade-friendly version of Brexit and as investors monitored the escalating trade standoff between the U.S. and China.

KEEPING SCORE: France's CAC 40 rose 0.5 percent to 5,402, while Germany's DAX added 0.2 percent to 12,520. Britain's FTSE 100 was also higher at 7,646, up 0.4 percent. U.S. shares were also set for gains, with Dow futures up 0.5 percent and S&P 500 futures gaining 0.4 percent.

At least six soldiers in Tunisia's national guard were killed Sunday in an apparent attack by an armed group near the Algerian border, and the country's interior minister vowed the dead would be avenged.

A national guard spokesman, Col. Houssemeddine Jbabli, told The Associated Press that six national guard members were killed and three were wounded. The country's official news agency, TAP, put the number of dead at nine. In a brief statement, Tunisian Interior Ministry attributed the deaths to a mine explosion.

A Lebanese woman was jailed for eight years in Egypt on Saturday for "harming" its people, a judicial source said, after she claimed in a video to have been sexually assaulted. 

As Syrian government forces press on with a furious offensive against rebel-held areas in the country's south, Israel is quietly acknowledging that President Bashar Assad's forces will soon be on its doorstep, laying down red lines for postwar relations with the Syrian leader.

Israel's main concern is to keep archrival Iran, an Assad ally, as far away from its border as possible — along with its proxy, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.

Rarely does the demure Paris couture week see a standing ovation.

Even rarer is the whooping and screaming that echoed around the gilded salons of the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild as Pierpaolo Piccioli took his bow following Valentino's collection Wednesday evening.