Russia halted a breakthrough wartime deal on Monday that allows grain to flow from Ukraine to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where hunger is a growing threat and high food prices have pushed more people into poverty.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would suspend the Black Sea Grain Initiative until its demands to get its own food and fertilizer to the world are met. While Russia has complained that restrictions on shipping and insurance have hampered its agricultural exports, it has shipped record amounts of wheat.

Central Bank Third Vice Governor Salim Chahine has confirmed that there will be no “mass resignation” of the bank’s four vice governors.

In remarks to Annahar newspaper published Monday, Chahine also said that the vice governors will not accept to “keep using depositors’ funds to cover the expenses of the state and the Sayrafa platform.”

A Lebanese depositor broke into Mawarid bank in Antelias on Monday to demand his trapped savings.

Edgard Awwad stormed the bank with his thirteen years old son and left after he received his entire savings, a sum of $15000.

Among meandering alleyways in the historic market of Lebanon's southern city of Sidon, cobblers and menders are doing brisk business, as an economic crisis revives demand for once-fading trades.

The founder and former CEO of the failed cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network was freed on $40 million bail Thursday after pleading not guilty to federal fraud charges alleging that he schemed to defraud customers by misleading them about key aspects of the business.

Alexander Mashinsky, 57, of Manhattan, was charged with securities, commodities and wire fraud in an indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court. He was also charged with illegally manipulating the price of Celsius's proprietary crypto token while secretly selling his own tokens at inflated prices.

Nigeria's new President Bola Tinubu has announced his government's plan to pay $10 a month to poor households to ease the growing hardship caused by the scrapping of subsidies on gasoline.

In a letter to the Nigerian Senate, which was read during Thursday's sitting, Tinubu said 12 million households will benefit from the handout for a period of six months. The government plans to fund it through an $800 million World Bank loan for which Tinubu is seeking legislators' approval.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Friday launched the construction of a 1,200-megawatt Chinese-designed nuclear energy project, which will be built at a cost of $3.5 billion as part of the government efforts to generate more clean energy in the Islamic nation.

The ceremony marking the start of the project comes less than a month after Pakistan signed an agreement with China's National Nuclear Corporation Overseas in the capital, Islamabad, to construct a Hualong One reactor — a third-generation nuclear reactor and is considered safer because of the latest security features.

China on Friday criticized a German government call for reducing dependency on Chinese products and decreasing other potentially unstable factors in bilateral relations, calling it a form of protectionism.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said that a long-awaited German government strategy for relations with China that pointed to a "systemic rivalry" went "against the trend of the times, and will only aggravate divisions in the world."

The British Embassy in Beirut said Friday that it has hosted a round-table for women economists and colleagues from the International Monetary Fund to discuss Lebanon’s 2023 Article IV Consultation report.

IMF’s Resident Representative in Lebanon, Frederico Lima, gave a summary of the last report which was issued few weeks ago. Open and honest discussions followed from the attendees highlighting the immense challenges facing Lebanon’s economy.

Iraqi officials have defended a deal inked this week to barter oil for gas with Iran, saying that the deal does not violate U.S. sanctions on Tehran and that it will help alleviate a worsening electricity crisis in Iraq.

The remarks come as the government in Baghdad struggles to maintain a balance between its two key allies, Washington and Tehran. A previous arrangement in which Iraq was buying gas from Iran and paying dollars for it was held up because Washington declined to approve sanctions waivers. That in turn led Iran to cut the gas supply, triggering severe power shortages in Iraq.