France will impose a nightly curfew on almost one third of the country's 67 million people to tackle a resurgent coronavirus, but a new national lockdown is not envisaged, President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday. Macron announced the curfews, which will take effect from Saturday and run...

Iraq's health ministry said Wednesday that more than 10,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the country whose threadbare health sector has been battered by the virus. Iraq has registered more than 413,000 cases, and the total death toll now stands at 10,021, the ministry said....

The journal Nature said Wednesday it was backing Democratic candidate Joe Biden for US president in a full-fronted attack on Donald Trump's "disastrous" handling of the pandemic and undermining of global efforts to tackle climate change. One of the world's most prestigious scientific...

Cristiano Ronaldo, who has tested positive for Covid-19, left the Portuguese team camp near Lisbon on Wednesday to fly back to Northern Italy on his private jet, local media reported. The Juventus player's jet took off in the afternoon from the Tires airfield, in the outskirts of Lisbon,...

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday encouraged Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel, in what would be a massive boost for the Jewish state amid normalization by two other Gulf Arab kingdoms. Bahrain, which tightly coordinates its foreign policy with Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that a second coronavirus vaccine has been granted regulatory approval. Putin said the vaccine, EpiVakKorona, was registered at the Vector State Research Center in Novosibirsk. On Aug. 11, Russia issued a temporary conditional registration...

A United Nations team will have to wait several weeks to access a deteriorating tanker off Yemen's shore that is threatening to spill 1.1 million barrels of crude oil in the Red Sea, two UN sources told Reuters. The United Nations has warned that the Safer, stranded since 2015, could spill...

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denied Wednesday claims that Turkey had sent Syrian fighters in support of its ally Azerbaijan over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. "Those who call us say 'you sent there the mujahideen from Syria'. We don't have any such agenda," Erdogan said in a...

Neymar scored a hat-trick to become the second highest scorer in Brazil's history as the Copa America champions won 4-2 away to 10-man Peru in a World Cup qualifier Tuesday. The goals took Neymar to 64 international strikes, two more than Ronaldo but still well behind Pele's record of 77....

The United States has started construction of a new military base in Syrian oil rich Deir Ez-Zor governorate near the Syrian-Iraqi border. Local sources said the new base will face sites controlled by Syrian regime forces on the western bank of the Euphrates River. The sources explained...

The European Union's latest strategy to defuse tensions with Turkey is unravelling, two weeks after it was sealed, raising the risk of conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean, diplomats, officials and experts said. Despite an EU summit deal in the early hours of Oct. 2 aimed at persuading...

 The first Syrians to be released from the al-Hol displaced persons camp in the country's northeast are on their way home, raising new questions about security and their ability to integrate back into society. The Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria (AANES) announced...

Over 63,000 new infections have taken India’s coronavirus count past 7.2 million, authorities said on Wednesday, as more doctors in the capital New Delhi stopped working for pending salaries. A total of 63,509 more cases were registered over the past 24 hours, raising the overall tally to...

Turkey's president said on Wednesday that the country had found new natural gas reserves in the Black Sea. Speaking to the parliamentary group of his ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the July 20 find of 320 billion cubic meters in reserves by Turkey's...

Israel approved 2,166 new homes in settlements across the occupied West Bank Wednesday, official figures sent to AFP showed, ending an eight-month lull in settlement expansion. The approvals came less than a month after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed agreements to normalise...

Two Afghan army helicopters collided while transporting wounded soldiers in the southern Helmand province, killing nine Afghan service members, the country's Defense Ministry and local officials said Wednesday. The two Soviet-era Mi-17 helicopters crashed due to technical problems while...

 European Union leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday and Friday to discuss Brexit will say that progress in talks with Britain is “still not sufficient” to seal a new trade deal, according to a draft summit decision seen by Reuters. As the year-end deadline approaches to put in...

China has opened a new front in its pressure campaign against Taiwan with a series of spying allegations and confessions aired on state television, denounced on the democratic island as entrapment and another reason for people to fear visiting China. China views Taiwan as its sovereign...

Lebanon’s Hezbollah and its ally Amal criticised on Wednesday the delegation set to negotiate with Israel over their disputed sea border, calling for changing the team hours before the first meeting. Formally still at war after decades of conflict, Lebanon and Israel agreed to launch talks...

Two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut blasted off on a fast-track journey to the International Space Station Wednesday, in the first such launch aboard a Russian capsule since SpaceX's game-changing debut manned flight from US soil. Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos and...