A Brazilian government watchdog has voted to give former President Jair Bolsonaro five working days to return to authorities a set of jewels he received from Saudi Arabia in 2021.

All nine members of the government watchdog voted in favor of requiring Bolsonaro to turn the jewels over to the state-owned Caixa Economica Federal bank in the capital city of Brasilia.

The foreign ministers of Israel and Poland have hailed a meeting they had as a breakthrough in restoring a relationship that has been badly damaged for years due to disagreements over how to remember Polish behavior during the Holocaust.

The ministers signed an agreement that they said would allow for the resumption of Israeli youth trips to Poland, one of several tension-causing points of contention between the two countries.

In his U.S. Capitol office, Rep. Jason Crow keeps several war mementos. Sitting on a shelf are his military identification tags, the tailfins of a spent mortar and a piece of shrapnel stopped by his body armor.

Two decades ago, Crow was a 24-year-old platoon leader in the American invasion of Iraq. Platoon members carried gas masks and gear to wear over their uniforms to protect them from the chemical weapons the U.S. believed — wrongly — that Iraqi forces might use against them.

The Palestinians and Israel clashed over the future intentions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far right-wing government at a U.N. Security Council meeting Wednesday, with the Palestinian U.N. ambassador pointing to an Israeli minister's statement "denying our existence to justify what is to come."

Israel's U.N. ambassador countered that the minister had apologized, and accused the Palestinian leadership of regularly inciting terrorism and erasing Jewish history.

Israel's parliament on Thursday passed the first of several laws that make up its contentious judicial overhaul as protesters opposing the changes staged another day of demonstrations aimed at raising alarm over what they see as the country's descent toward autocracy.

Thousands of people protested throughout the country, blocking traffic on main highways and scuffling with police in unrest that shows no sign of abating, especially as the overhaul moves ahead.

The first daily fast of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan began Thursday, as hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide enter a four-week period of worship.

The observance comes at a time when numerous countries and governments across the Middle East are taking tentative steps towards calming enduring conflicts and crises made more acute by the costly war in Ukraine and a devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria that killed over 52,000 people.

Complexes of McMansions, fast food restaurants, real estate offices and half-constructed high-rises line wide highways in Irbil, the seat of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

Many members of the political and business elite live in a suburban gated community dubbed the American Village, where homes sell for as much as $5 million, with lush gardens consuming more than a million liters of water a day in the summer.

A building collapsed Wednesday in Qatar's capital, killing at least one person as searchers clawed through the rubble to check for survivors, authorities said.

Qatar's Interior Ministry described the building as a four-story structure in Doha's Bin Durham neighborhood. It said rescuers found seven survivors, while the one person killed had been inside the building at the time of the collapse.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to back down on Wednesday, saying his government has "no intention" of returning to four abandoned settlements in the occupied West Bank under a law that was repealed by parliament this week.

His statement followed harsh U.S. criticism and an international uproar over Netanyahu's far-right government, the country's most hard-line ever, over the Knesset vote early Tuesday to revoke a 2005 law that dismantled the four settlements.

Muslim authorities in Saudi Arabia and several other Middle Eastern countries say this year's fasting month of Ramadan will begin Thursday based on the expected sighting of the crescent moon.

Clerics across the region said the moon was not visible Tuesday night, meaning it will almost certainly appear the following evening, heralding the start of the monthlong observance.