Syrian regime attacks in Idlib and Hama have displaced nearly 200,000 civilians over the past five months, the Director of the Syrian Response Coordinators Team, Mohammed Al-Hallaj, said. Al-Hallaj told the Anadolu Agency that some 122,000 civilians have been displaced from the...

U.S. President Donald Trump's statement that it was time to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights has brought the region to the edge of a new crisis, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday. In a speech at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation,...

Children under age 15 are almost three times more likely to die from diseases due to lack of clean water and sanitation than from violence in countries in conflict, the United Nations’ children’s agency reported on Friday. Most vulnerable are young children under age 5, who are 20 times...

The Syrian government condemned on Friday U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement that it was time to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and said Syria was determined to recover the area “through all available means”. In a statement published by the Syrian state news...

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) battled Islamic State militants holed up in the Baghouz area overnight, supported by U.S.-led coalition air strikes, the SDF said, seeking to defeat the last pockets of jihadist resistance. The SDF has been battling for weeks to defeat Islamic State at the...

Venezuelan authorities detained opposition leader Juan Guaido's chief of staff on Thursday in a pre-dawn raid, an escalating crackdown by President Nicolas Maduro against his opponents that the White House said would "not go unanswered." Maduro's government accused Roberto Marrero of...

Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft will be outfitted with a warning light for malfunctions in the anti-stall system suspected in October's fatal crash in Indonesia, an industry source told AFP Thursday, standardizing a feature previously sold as an optional extra. The development comes as the...

After years of war, the scent of laurel oil once again wafts from a small soap workshop in Aleppo, signalling the revival of a landmark trade in the battered northern city. Surrounding soap workshops in the Al-Nayrab district still lie in ruins, badly damaged in the four-year battle for the...

The Palestinian Authority faces a suffocating financial crisis after deep US aid cuts and an Israeli move to withhold tax transfers, sparking fears for the stability of the West Bank. The authority, headed by President Mahmud Abbas, announced a package of emergency measures on March 10,...

Growing restrictions on Hong Kong's freedoms are hurting business confidence, the United States warned in a report Friday, accusing the city's government of sacrificing human rights to support mainland Chinese priorities. Hong Kong enjoys liberties unseen on the mainland under the "one...

New Zealand broadcast the Muslim call for prayer on national television and radio Friday as a sign of solidarity with that community after recent terror attacks in the country.  Friday marked exactly one week since the attacks in which at least 50 Muslims were killed when a terrorist...

An explosion on Thursday in a chemical plant in eastern China killed at least 44 people and injured 640 others, said Chinese state media. The blast took place at a plant run by Tianjiayi Chemical in Yancheng, said state news agency Xinhua. Another 90 people were seriously injured, the...

The EU agreed to a Brexit extension until May 22 if Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal is approved by the House of Commons, European Council President Donald Tusk said Thursday. If the deal is not approved by parliament, the EU would allow an extension to April 12, Tusk said in Brussels....

Israel said on Thursday a U.N. report critical of its use of lethal force during Palestinian protests on the Gaza border was biased and should have included a demand that the enclave’s dominant Hamas group take action to stop anti-Israeli violence. A U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the...

U.S. sanctions on Hezbollah are harming Lebanon as a whole, President Michel Aoun said on Thursday ahead of a visit to the country by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The United States deems the heavily armed, Iran-backed Hezbollah group a terrorist organization and has been steadily...

At least 79 people died when an overloaded ferry carrying families on an outing sank in the Tigris river in Mosul in northern Iraq, medical sources told Reuters on Thursday. Most of the casualties on the ferry were women and children who could not swim, said the head of Mosul’s Civil...

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday it was time to back Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights that Israel seized from Syria in 1967, marking a dramatic shift in U.S. policy and giving a boost to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the middle of his re-election campaign....

Kurdish-led forces Thursday combed the banks of the Euphrates in eastern Syria to smoke out the last jihadists preventing the much-delayed announcement of the demise of the Islamic State's "caliphate". The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) launched an assault against the last IS...

Cristiano Ronaldo was fined 20,000 euros ($22,738) by UEFA on Thursday for mimicking Atletico Madrid coach Diego Simeone's crotch-grabbing celebration in Juventus' Champions League last-16 win last week. The 34-year-old scored a second-leg hat-trick as the Italian champions overturned a 2-0...

French prosecutors have called for the uncle of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to stand trial on charges of pilfering Syrian state coffers to amass a 90 million-euro ($102 million) property portfolio in France, including a stud farm and a chateau, judicial sources told AFP Thursday....