The Rome Film Festival opened on Thursday with a screening of the Pixar animated film about a jazzman's dreams, "Soul," despite the lingering coronavirus that has transformed film watching in public. As at the world-famous cinema festival in Venice last month, thermal scanners will measure...

Iraq's finance minister said Thursday there is growing political will to undertake drastic reforms needed for the country to tackle a daunting liquidity crisis, which has pushed Iraq to the brink of collapse. "There is more will now than there was five months ago," Finance Minister Ali...

World number one Novak Djokovic said Thursday he planned to play two more tournaments until the end of the season -- in Vienna and London -- and keep his top ATP ranking. "I'm going to play the Vienna tournament that wasn't originally on my schedule," Djokovic told AFP. He was speaking...

The Kurdish-led forces controlling northeast Syria Thursday freed more than 600 Syrian prisoners detained over links to Daesh (ISIS). The 631 detainees had been held on terrorism charges and were the first batch released in an amnesty deal announced recently following calls from Arab tribes...

Joe Biden's presidential campaign said Thursday that vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris will suspend in-person events until Monday after two people associated with the campaign tested positive for coronavirus. The campaign said Biden had no exposure, though he and Harris spent several...

Israel has approved the construction of thousands of settlement units in the occupied West Bank. "The Higher Planning Council [HPC] of the Civil Administration approved 4,948 settlement units in a couple dozen plans on 14 and 15 October 2020," Israeli Peace Now, a rights group that...

 Hackers launched large-scale attacks on two Iranian government institutions this week, a senior official said on Thursday, without giving details on the targets or the suspected perpetrators. Some government bodies had since temporarily shut down internet services as a precaution,...

A tweet by President Donald Trump calling for U.S. troops to be home by Christmas has given the insurgent Taliban the upper hand in negotiations, the top Afghanistan peace official told the Financial Times newspaper. Trump posted the tweet last week, hours after his national security...

A newspaper owned by the Saudi government and rather ironically called Independent Arabia has started to promote the restoration of links with the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad, Aram Media reported on Wednesday. The Saudi government has boycotted Assad and his regime for almost a decade due...

Warlord Khalifa Haftar’s militia on Thursday fired four rockets aimed at targeting Libyan troops deployed west of Sirte. In a statement, military spokesman Abdul-Hadi Dara said: "Haftar's militia fired four rockets at the Buerat area located west of the city of Sirte, which is a base for...

France and Germany accused Turkey on Thursday of continuing to provoke the European Union with its actions in the eastern Mediterranean, and gave it a week to clarify its positions. Despite an EU summit deal on Oct. 2 aimed at persuading Ankara to stop exploring for natural gas in waters...

Armenia accused Turkey on Thursday of blocking flights carrying emergency aid from using its airspace, and new fighting over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave threatened to pitch the region into a humanitarian crisis. Azerbaijan and Armenia accused each other of violating a ceasefire brokered...

Planes carrying prisoners exchanged by the warring parties in Yemen took off from three airports on Thursday in an operation to return about 1,000 men home across the front lines, the International Committee of the Red Cross said. The Saudi-led military coalition and Yemen’s Houthi movement...

Andreyah Garland, a 44-year-old single mother of three daughters, bought a shotgun in May for protection in the quaint middle-class town of Fishkill, New York. She joined a new and fast-growing local gun club to learn how to shoot. She has since applied for a pistol permit and constantly...

Two U.S. nationals held by Houthi rebels in Yemen have been released, Omani state media said on Wednesday, in what may have been part of a prisoner swap, with Oman sending flights to Sanaa to return 250 Yemenis from the Gulf state and abroad. “Under the directions of Sultan Haitham bin...

Lebanon's protest movement has made some important gains since it burst out onto the streets a year ago, even if its revolutionary fever has died down. Demonstrations that erupted last October 17 over a planned tax on calls made via messaging apps quickly evolved into an unprecedented...

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen spoke by phone Wednesday evening, with Johnson expressing his “disappointment” over the lack of progress in Brexit talks. “The Prime Minister noted the desirability of a deal but expressed his...

Ongoing illness after infection with COVID-19, sometimes called "long COVID", may not be one syndrome but possibly up to four causing a rollercoaster of symptoms affecting all parts of the body and mind, doctors said Thursday. In an initial report about long-term COVID-19, Britain's...

Libya’s internationally recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) has detained Abdalrahman al-Milad, a coastguard commander sanctioned by the United Nations for alleged human trafficking and migrant smuggling, its interior ministry said on Wednesday. The ministry said it had detained...

 Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun has postponed by a week consultations aimed at choosing a prime minister to form a new government to tackle the country’s worst economic crisis since its 1975-1990 civil war, the presidency said on Wednesday. Aoun had been due to hold the consultations...