The five-bedroom house in Cadogan Gardens, Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from high-end store Harrods, belonged to Lebanon’s billionaire Hariri family and was sold to a businessman for £19.75 million ($24m).

The family commissioned Mr Pinto to refurbish and interior design the Rutland Gate mansion, creating one of London’s most magnificent private homes.

After the death of Rafik Hariri in 2005, the family gave the Rutland Gate property to Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the late crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

The European Union will temporarily shift back to coal to cope with slowing Russian gas flows, an EU official said on Wednesday, as a tight gas market and rocketing prices set off a race for alternative fuels.

European leaders have rounded on Russia after flows through its Nord Stream 1 pipeline were cut to just 40% of capacity, deepening an energy standoff after the invasion of Ukraine prompted Europe to impose tough sanctions on Moscow.

The EU and other developed economies have sanctioned Russian oil and coal but held off banning gas imports.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman began a two-day visit to Egypt on Monday evening, the presidency in Cairo said, kicking off a regional tour extending to Jordan and Turkey.

The crown prince’s regional tour comes weeks ahead of a visit to Saudi Arabia by US President Joe Biden, whose administration has lately sought to repair ties with Riyadh, despite him earlier calling the kingdom a “pariah” state.

The 2022 Lebanon Crisis Response Plan (LCRP) aims to deliver critical assistance to more than three million people as vulnerabilities rise, and to support public infrastructure, services, and the local economy.

Lebanon, which has an overall population of approximately 6.7 million, remains the country hosting the largest number of refugees per capita and per square kilometre, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.

The Lebanese government has pledged to scale up the number of local families benefiting from regular cash-based assistance under the National Poverty Targeting Programme, which is led by the authorities and funded by donors under the LCRP. The goal is to go from 36,000 families to 75,000 over the next two months.

European Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas on Saturday called on Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot government to do more to stem migrant arrivals on the ethnically divided Mediterranean island.

After a visit to an upgraded migrant facility outside the capital, Nicosia, Schinas said Brussels “won’t let the Turkish Cypriot community consider itself neutral in what is going on.”

The Cypriot government says around 90% of migrants enter via Turkey and the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north through a loosely regulated student visa system.

Thousands of people then cross the UN buffer zone to seek asylum in the Greek Cypriot south.

Australia has not signed up to a US-led statement about Israel and the Palestinian territories, instead raising deep concerns about “human rights abuses and the lack of progress towards a just and enduring two-state solution”.

Gorely said Australia did not support the proposition that Israel was the only country that was a permanent item on the human rights council’s agenda. That was the reason Australia retained “fundamental concerns” about the nature of the commission of inquiry that published its first report last week.

But the Australian government indicated it would seek to take a balanced approach.

Israel and Egypt plan to boost gas exports to Europe under an agreement signed during a Cairo visit Wednesday by the European Commission president as the bloc seeks to wean itself off Russian gas.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed our European dependency on Russian fossil fuels, and we want to get rid of this dependency,” von der Leyen told a joint press conference with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

The memorandum of understanding on gas exports between Egypt, Israel and the EU was signed at the East Mediterranean Gas Forum, the Egyptian petroleum ministry said.

Comments made by Turkey’s foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on issues of ‘TRNC’ citizenship during a visit to the north were met by resistance by various members of society in the north on Tuesday.

According to Turkish Cypriot daily Avrupa, the youth wing of the Socialist Democracy Party (TDP) in the north slammed the statements made by Cavusoglu on the issue of granting ‘TRNC citizenship’ to all those who apply for it, describing it as unacceptable.

The party’s youth group called on the Turkish foreign minister to “know his limits, and for Ozturkler to resign,” the newspaper noted.