The dollar was on course for its worst quarter in seven years on Friday, recovering only marginally against major peers after a week of hawkish central bank jawboning on inflation that has shaken major currency markets. It gained around 0.2 percent against the euro in early trade in Europe,...

The world's chemical weapons watchdog said the banned nerve agent sarin was used in an attack in northern Syria in April that killed dozens of people, a report from a fact-finding team seen by Reuters on Thursday showed. The report was circulated to members of the Organisation for the...

Five suicide bombers attacked Lebanese soldiers as they raided two Syrian refugee camps in the Arsal area at the border with Syria on Friday and a sixth militant threw a hand grenade at a patrol, the army said. Seven soldiers were wounded. A Lebanese army statement said one suicide bomber...

The US Treasury Department on Thursday slapped sanctions on a Chinese bank over illicit activities in North Korea, including facilitating the production of weapons of mass destruction. Bank of Dandong which "acts as a conduit for illicit North Korean financial activity, is a foreign bank of...

A man was arrested after trying to drive a car into a crowd in front of a mosque in the Paris suburb of Creteil Thursday, police said, adding that no one was injured. The man's motives were unclear, and he had not succeeded in reaching the crowd because of barriers in front of the mosque, police...

Iran's state news agency quoted a representative of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday as saying Islamic State's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was "definitely dead". "Terrorist Baghdadi is definitely dead," IRNA quoted cleric Ali Shirazi, representative to the Quds...

(Zaman Al Wasl)- At least 38 regime army troops from the coastal city of Latakia in a week of clashes that take place in the desert and in southern Syria, activists told Zaman al-Wasl. The death toll included General, Colonel, Colonel Lieutenant, 2 Captains and 2 lieutenants, mostly...

(Zaman Al Wasl)- The Criminal Security Branch subordinate to the Ministry of Interior in Latakia announced that a criminal gang, whose members belong to the National Defense militia, were arrested in a break with the Branch’s previous approach to National Defense members’ crimes. ...

A Moscow jury convicted five men on Thursday in the assassination of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on a bridge near the Kremlin two years ago, ending a nine-month trial that his supporters said had failed to bring the true masterminds of slaying to justice. The brazen killing so close to...

Women and children involved with groups like Daesh (ISIS) are increasingly returning to their home countries in Europe, with some posing a terror risk, a senior EU official said Thursday. The "new trend" of females and juveniles coming back from Middle East war zones means European countries...

( Al-Monitor )- Congress is threatening to cut funding for Iraq’s vaunted Kurdish peshmerga fighters if the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) ends up splitting with Baghdad. The House Armed Services Committee released a draft annual defense bill this week that makes continued funding for...

More than 16 years into the Afghanistan war, the United States and its NATO allies wrangled anew on Thursday over how to meet the need for more troops to counter the resurgent Taliban and help the Afghan forces break a stalemate in the fight. At a meeting in Brussels, NATO agreed to send...

United States-backed forces cut off the last escape route for Daesh (ISIS) from Raqqa on Thursday, a monitor said, trapping the besieged extremist inside their de facto Syrian capital.  Fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces captured two villages on the southern bank of the...

(Zaman Al Wasl)- Sources from inside Homs city reported that an explosion, which was heard in Homs city and its countryside shortly after midnight, was caused by the regime or one of its militias’ arms depots exploding after it was targeted with missiles or bombed during an air strike. It...

President Donald Trump's temporary ban on people from six predominantly Muslim countries and all refugees entering the United States is finally scheduled to take effect later on Thursday, but in a scaled-back form that still allows in some travelers. The rollout of the controversial measure...

 Turkey would respond to any kind of harassment fire from PKK/PYD-held northwestern Afrin region of Syria, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said Thursday. Kurtulmus’s comment came as Turkey deployed military troops to the border line near Afrin region last week. He said that his...

A parole committee has decided to grant early release to Israeli ex-prime minister Ehud Olmert, who is serving a 27-month prison sentence for corruption, his lawyer said Thursday. "The committee accepted all our arguments," Olmert's lawyer Shani Illouz told public radio. "As of now, Olmert...

The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces warned on Thursday of the prospect of fierce confrontation with the Turkish army in northwestern Syria if it attacks SDF areas, and said this would undermine the assault on Islamic State at Raqqa. Naser Haj Mansour, a senior SDF official, told...

( CBS )- A dirt airstrip for the U.S. military and a storage space for over 100 tons of munitions is carved out of the desert in northern Syria. It's an American logistics hub for the fight to retake Raqqa -- the so-called ISIS capital -- that began almost a month ago. Lt. Gen. Stephen...

France said on Thursday it saw a chance to break the stalemate in Syria's war as Russia now seemed to accept there could be no military solution and preconditions set by some opponents of President Bashar Assad had been dropped. The election of President Emmanuel Macron has provided an...