French President Emmanuel Macron is traveling to Cyprus. The visit on Monday comes days after France dispatched a warship to the east Mediterranean island nation amid the Iran war. A Shahed drone struck a British air base on its southern coast last week. Macron ordered the French frigate Languedoc to waters off Cyprus to bolster the European Union member country’s anti-drone and anti-missiles defenses. The French president also decided to send ground-based anti-drone and anti-missile defenses to the island. Macron will meet Monday with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides and Greek Prime Kyriakos Mitsotakis at Cyprus’ main air base.

Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who was named as his successor, had long been considered a contender to the post even before an Israeli strike killed his father and despite the fact he had never been elected or appointed to a government position. A secretive figure within the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba Khamenei was not seen publicly in the days after an Israeli airstrike targeting the supreme leader’s offices killed his 86-year-old father at the start of the war. Mojtaba Khamenei will now have a central say in Iran’s war strategy with the country’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard answering to him.

Authorities say a counterprotester demonstrating against a “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City” event Saturday lit and threw a device at the protesting crowd after someone from that group used pepper spray on the counterprotest. New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the incident started late Saturday morning when someone from the anti-Islam protest associated with conservative influencer Jake Lang shot pepper spray into a counterprotesting group near Gracie Mansion. Tensions continued to heighten, she said, when someone in the counterprotest lit and threw a device she described as smaller than a football into the protesting crowd of about 20 people.

The travel chaos from the war in the Middle East has ensnared many of the Muslims who have converged on Saudi Arabia for the Umrah pilgrimage, leaving them stranded and scrambling to find other ways home. Others had to scrap their planned visits altogether. For some who performed the religious rituals, the war roiling the region has cast a pall on their experience of visiting the kingdom’s holy sites. One Indonesian government official says that as of Thursday, over 58,860 Indonesian pilgrims were stranded in Saudi Arabia. He said the government is negotiating with Saudi authorities and airlines to ease the financial burden of hotel and flight costs on the stranded pilgrims.

Muslims across the United States are observing Ramadan under rising fears tied to immigration raids, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and war in the Middle East. Community members in places like Paterson, New Jersey, and Minneapolis say many are striving to maintain the Ramadan spirit while grappling with myriad concerns affecting their communities. In Minnesota, an imam says a mosque has canceled communal iftar meals after local businesses took an economic hit from the federal government's immigration crackdown. National groups are sharing know-your-rights guidance for mosque leaders. Leaders also point to harsh anti-Muslim vitriol during the current election season. Even so, many communities keep praying, fasting and supporting one another.

Officials with one of the armed Kurdish Iranian dissident groups based in northern Iraq say they are not planning an imminent cross-border attack on Iran but would join a ground invasion if the U.S. were to launch one. Khalil Nadiri, an official with the Kurdistan Freedom Party PAK, made the comments in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. The comments appeared to be aimed at reassuring Iraqi Kurdish officials, who have said they do not want attacks to be launched against Iran from their territory. They fear that they will be further dragged into the war in the Middle East sparked by the U.S. and Israel’s strikes on Iran.

Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, long has been considered a contender to the post of the country’s next paramount ruler even before his father's death. He has never been elected nor appointed to a government position. Khamenei has been a secretive figure within the Islamic Republic. He has not been seen publicly since Saturday. That is when an Israeli airstrike targeting the supreme leader’s offices killed his 86-year-old father and sparked the war raging across the Middle East. That attack also killed the younger Khamenei’s wife, Zahra Haddad Adel, who came from a family long associated with the country’s theocracy.