A first group of 107 highly vulnerable Syrian refugees arrived by plane in the northern German city of Hanover today from Lebanon under a special humanitarian programme announced by the German government earlier this year. "The airplane just landed and the families are getting off," UNHCR...

Fighters from an al Qaeda-linked rebel group killed 12 members of the minority Alawite sect in central  Syria  after seizing their village, an opposition monitoring group said on Wednesday. Alawites are an offshoot sect of Shi'ite Islam and have been increasingly targeted by...

A week of gains for world  stocks  petered out on Wednesday and a sell-off in oil and core government debt eased, as talks began on trying to avert a U.S. military strike on  Syria  against a broadly calm market backdrop. The safe-haven yen was at a seven-week low...

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Wednesday he hoped that a U.S. promise to pursue diplomacy to remove the threat of chemical weapons in  Syria  was "serious", the state news agency IRNA reported. "I am hopeful that the United States new attitude to ...