Iraq's top Shiite cleric Sunday endorsed early parliamentary elections set for June 2021, following his first meeting in nearly a year with a senior United Nations official. "The parliamentary elections scheduled for next year are of great importance," said Grand Ayatollah Ali...

Just before Marie Colvin died, she was looking for her shoes. Rockets had already hit the top floors of the makeshift press centre where she was holed up, in the Baba Amr neighbourhood of Homs in mid-west Syria. Another landed and she was killed before she made it out. Her death was...

The United Nations independent expert on poverty is warning that the worst impacts from the coronavirus pandemic on poverty are yet to come, and that measures taken by governments to protect people so far have been insufficient. "The social safety nets put into place are full of holes,"...

A trove of Saddam-era files secretly returned to Iraq has pried open the country's painful past, prompting hopes some may learn the fate of long-lost relatives along with fears of new bloodshed. The five million pages of internal Baath Party documents were found in 2003, just months after...