Asylum seekers, mainly from Haiti, clambering over a gully from upstate New York into Canada on Friday were undeterred by the prospect of days in border tents, months of uncertainty and signs of a right-wing backlash in Quebec. More than 200 people a day are illegally walking across the U.S....

( The Guardian )- Eurovision song contest winner Conchita Wurst has cancelled her performance at the Edinburgh festival after her band members were denied visas. The Austrian drag queen had been due to perform at the Friday night showing of New European Songbook alongside her Syrian...

( Al-Monitor )- A State Department review that faulted the agency for failing to comply with its own policies for overseeing bomb disposal grants in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan won’t impact ongoing efforts to remove improvised explosive devices left behind by the Islamic State (IS), officials...

Hezbollah and its allies are pressing the Lebanese state to normalize relations with President Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria, testing Lebanon's policy of "dissociation" from the Syrian conflict and igniting a political row. Calls for closer ties with the Syrian government, including...

 Iran hit back Friday at Donald Trump's warnings on Tehran's ballistic missiles programme, accusing the US president of showing "bad faith" over the 2015 nuclear accord. "POTUS (president of the United States) always wanted to kill" the deal, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif...

A German court sentenced three Syrian men on Friday for running a smuggling ring from Turkey to Europe over the deaths of 13 migrants in the Mediterranean two years ago. The migrants drowned after their dinghy collided with a freighter off the Greek island of Lesbos in September 2015....

(Eqtsad)- Few Syrians may have started depositing their money in banks prior to and after the revolution, but in liberated areas, there are no commercial banks or banks at all, so how are people saving their money? A few years before the revolution, Muayyad opened a carpet shop in...

More than 600,000 Syrians returned to their homes in the first seven months of this year, nearly as many as in all of 2016, but they are still outnumbered by those freshly displaced, the U.N. migration agency said Friday. Many went back to their areas of origin to check on property or...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday it is a pity that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump was casting doubt on the 2015 deal to curtail Iran's nuclear weapons program. "Unfortunately now our American partners call this ... [treaty] into question," Lavrov told...

U.S.-backed Syrian fighters advancing from eastern and western parts of the northern city of Raqqa have linked up for the first time in weeks after launching their offensive against Daesh (ISIS) militants there. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces launched a wide offensive to capture...

Turkey is taking necessary measures along its 150 km border with the Syrian province of Idlib, where militants linked to a former Al Qaeda-affiliate have taken control, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Friday. Yildirim was speaking a day after Turkey's customs minister said Turkish...

 A man suspected of ramming his car into French soldiers has been transferred to a Paris hospital but remains too badly injured to face questioning or prosecution. A judicial official said the man was brought to the capital Friday by helicopter from a hospital in Lille, and was not in a...

The U.N. Yemen envoy called on Friday for the urgent reopening of the airport in the rebel-held capital Sanaa, which has been closed to all but limited U.N. flights for a year. A Saudi-led coalition supporting the government imposed an air and sea blockade on rebel-held territory in March...

The Philippines will cull at least 400,000 birds after confirming its first bird flu outbreak, but says no animal-to-human transmission has been reported. Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Pinol says he has ordered all fouls within a kilometer of six affected farms in northern San Luis town...

( The Guardian )- In the early, heady days of the Syrian revolution, opponents of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and advocates for human rights saw an opportunity. “Women were extremely active and present,” says writer and journalist Samar Yazbek. But as the war escalated, some of this hope was lost....

A prominent member of Hong Kong's Democratic Party said on Friday he was beaten and "stapled" by mainland agents in the Chinese-controlled city before being dumped on a beach in what activists said was the latest warning to the democracy movement. Howard Lam, a key pro-democracy activist in...

Turkish police on Friday detained 42 people over suspected militant links in operations across two separate provinces, security sources said and media reported. Police detained 22 suspected Daesh (ISIS) militants in operations across the eastern province of Elazig, security sources said....

( The New Arab )- Jordan became the first Arab country to begin issuing a new type of work permit to Syrian refugees, the United Nations labour agency said on Wednesday. Work permits for refugees used to be tied to specific employers who applied on behalf of workers to fill specific positions,...

( The Guardian )- Concerns are mounting over the civilian cost of the US-led coalition’s campaign to reclaim Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, with reports of airstrikes killing and wounding hundreds of Syrians.  The reports, which cannot be definitively confirmed but are...

As nuclear-armed North Korea's missile stand-off with the U.S. escalates, calls are mounting in the South for Seoul to build nuclear weapons of its own to defend itself - which would complicate the situation even further. The South, which hosts U.S. 28,500 troops on its soil to defend it...