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DHAKA, April 8 -- Customs officials at Bangladesh's second largest airport in the seaport city of Chattogram on Monday morning seized 200 gold bars weighing over 23 kilograms, an official said.

The Customs Intelligence Department official who preferred to be unnamed told Xinhua that "We've found 200 gold bars abandoned at a toilet in flight of Biman Bangladesh Airlines."

The flight of Biman Bangladesh Airlines arrived in Chattogram, some 242 km southeast of capital Dhaka, from Dubai at about 6:00 a.m. local time.

According to the official, the gold bars worth about 100 million taka (around 1.43 million U.S. dollars).

No one was arrested in connection with the seizure.

RABAT, March 25 -- Morocco will buy 3.787 billion U.S. dollars' worth of arms from the United States, the Moroccan financial news site Medias24.com reported Monday.

According to a press release by the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency earlier in the day, the deal includes the purchase of 25 F-16/D Block 72 aircraft and related equipment.

Morocco currently has 23 F-16 aircraft

WASHINGTON, March 19 -- The U.S. Department of the Treasury on Tuesday slapped sanctions on a Venezuelan gold mining company and its leader, accusing them of supporting President Nicolas Maduro.

The sanctions target CVG Compania General de Mineria de Venezuela CA, or Minerven, the Venezuelan state-run ferrous metals mining company, and its president Adrian Antonio Perdomo Mata, the Treasury said in a statement.

The Treasury accused them of participating in "the illicit gold operations that have continued to prop up" the Maduro government. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement that Washington will "aggressively pursue those involved with Maduro's reckless illicit gold trade."

As a result of Tuesday's sanctions, all property and assets in property of the company and its chief in the United States are blocked and all U.S. citizens are prohibited from dealing with them, according to the statement.

This is the sixth round of sanctions since January by the Trump administration to pile up pressure on incumbent Venezuelan President Maduro.

The Trump administration recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation's "interim president" on January 23, days after Maduro was inaugurated for a second term as Venezuelan president.

In response to Washington's support for Guaido, Maduro announced he was severing "diplomatic and political" ties with the United States.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 13 -- Facebook said Wednesday that some of its core products, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, have experienced service outages in some areas around the world.

Facebook users across the globe reported problems logging into their accounts or sharing posts on its website, as some people were not able to refresh feeds or post new files.

"Instagram was down for a few hours so here I am... I'm tired of waiting," said Twitter user Myrella@mkifuri inher twitter account.

Facebook acknowledged the service outage in a tweet Wednesday but gave little information about the problems that happened to its apps.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps," Facebook said.

The world's largest social media network added that it focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

It confirmed that the issue is not related to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on its platform or servers, without further specifying what has caused the service interruption.