Taiwan hopes to continue its close cooperation with the United States, the island’s de facto U.S. ambassador told Antony Blinken, a longtime confidant of President-elect Joe Biden, as Taiwan moves to shore up ties with the new administration. Claimed by China but democratically ruled,...

Five American soldiers killed in a helicopter crash this week while on a peacekeeping mission in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula included one who left behind a wife pregnant with their daughter. The soldiers were part of an international force that monitors the four-decade-old Israeli-Egyptian...

The Israeli military said it struck Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip early Sunday after militants fired two rockets from the Palestinian territory. In a statement, the military said fighter jets, attack helicopters and tanks hit Hamas underground infrastructure and military posts. It said...

Six months before the Iranian presidential election, Joe Biden’s victory in the US could influence the vote in Iran, where hopes to resume negotiations on the nuclear deal have prompted enthusiasm from moderates and even some hardliners. However, analysts expect that any future talks would be...

Evacuation of refugees from Rukban camp in Syria has been resumed, with over 200 people leaving it in the past 24 hours, Alexander Grinkevich, deputy chief of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of Opposing Parties in Syria, said on Friday. "As many as 203 people left for the...

Iran on Saturday dismissed a US newspaper report that Al-Qaeda's second-in-command was killed in Tehran by Israeli agents as "made-up information" and denied the presence of any of the Sunni jihadist group's members in the Islamic republic. The New York Times said Abdullah Ahmad...

A top Lebanese security official said Saturday that after returning from Washington recently he visited Syria for two days where he spoke with officials about American journalist Austin Tice who has been missing in the war-torn country since 2012. Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim did not give...

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Two Illinois men who pleaded guilty to a 2017 bombing of a Minnesota mosque testified that the group's alleged ringleader recruited them for an unspecified job and didn't fill them in on his plan until they neared their target. Michael McWhorter, 31, and Joe...

PARIS (AP) — Dry-coughing as he pedals — a hack, hack, hack after-effect of his own personal battle with COVID-19 — the doctor cycles through the dark of pre-dawn Paris, speeding to a crisis meeting at his hospital where, way back in February, the disease carried away the first of what has now...

The health system in Syria’s northwest is on the verge of collapse, doctors have warned, as the opposition-held region sees a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases in overcrowded camps. Salem Abdan, director of Idlib’s health directorate, said the enclave has been recording around 400 new...

Despite signing a ceasefire agreement in northern Idlib province with Turkey in March, Russia continues to test new weapons by targeting civilians in the rebel-held region. Our sources confirmed that two weeks ago, Russia began testing KYB-UAV “kamikaze drones”. A week ago, a...

(AP) — Joe Biden faces a decision unlike any other incoming president: whether to back a short-term national lockdown to finally arrest a raging pandemic. For now, it's a question the president-elect would prefer to avoid. In the week since he defeated President Donald Trump, Biden has...

James Jeffrey says he has played “shell games” to hide true numbers of American troops in northern Syria, misleading President Donald Trump. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, has made a startling revelation, stating that he kept Trump in the dark about the...

By  Patricia Karam (The Hill)- After nearly a decade of war, Syrians have endured more than 500,000 deaths, over 200 chemical attacks, 12 million displacements, and nearly 130,000 recorded disappearances. Although the Assad regime’s stranglehold on the state persists, small steps...

Palestinian prime minister and groups decried Friday US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s plan to visit the Golan Heights and an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank next week. “Pompeo's plan to visit Jewish settlements is a dangerous attempt. It is against international law and...

Libya’s warring sides agreed Friday to hold elections on Dec. 24, 2021, on Libya's independence day, according to the head of the UN support mission in the country. The decision came during a UN-sponsored Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) which began Monday in Tunisia between...

 Gliding over significant challenges still to come, President Donald Trump on Friday offered a rosy update on the race for a vaccine for the resurgent coronavirus as he delivered his first public remarks since his defeat by President-elect Joe Biden. He still did not concede the election....

Dominic Cummings, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s most powerful adviser, will stop working for Downing Street in mid-December as Johnson tries to reset his premiership after a series of failures in tackling the coronavirus pandemic. Cummings, expected to stay until around Christmas,...

The man suspected of knifing to death three people in a church in the French city of Nice had on his telephone pictures of the man who beheaded a middle school teacher near Paris 13 days earlier, prosecutors said on Friday. The discovery of the photos on the phone of 21-year-old Tunisian...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called on Canadians Friday to redouble efforts to slow the spread of Covid-19, citing a record number of new cases and projections the count could soon double. There were nearly 5,000 new cases reported across Canada on Thursday, including 83 deaths, and those...