Sudan will keep its airports closed for both internal and international commercial passenger flights until May. 31, the state news agency SUNA said on Sunday, extending a shutdown that began in March due to the coronavirus outbreak. The airport will remain open only for flights for cargo,...

Sixteen people in Lebanon, mostly Syrians, have been arrested for money transfers and "illegal" currency exchange operations, the army said on Saturday, amid a government crackdown on exchange rate manipulation.  The army said in a statement that it had arrested 13 Syrians and three...

Israel's parliament swore in a new unity government Sunday led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former rival Benny Gantz, ending more than 500 days of political deadlock. Lawmakers in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, formally approved the three-year coalition government with 73...

Emirates Group plans to cut about 30,000 jobs to reduce costs amid the coronavirus outbreak, reducing employees by about 30 percent from more than 105,000 at the end of March, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company is also considering speeding up the...

Lebanon will gradually lift a coronavirus lockdown that has compounded its economic crisis, Prime Minister Hassan Diab said Sunday, despite an uptick in cases that prompted a four-day lockdown. Speaking on television, Diab said that the country would "reopen based on the five-stage plan" as...

At least two civilians were killed in seven fire outbreaks in the last three weeks in the tent camps at the Turkey-Syria border zone, according to a local official on Sunday. Mohammad Hallaj, the director of Syria's Response Coordination Group, told Anadolu Agency that the gas cylinders...

A senior adviser to Iran's parliament speaker on Sunday denied reports about reaching an agreement with Russia on the removal of Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria. In a tweet, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian described al-Assad as "the legitimate president of Syria." "Report of a deal between...

The global coronavirus recoveries surpassed the 1.7 million mark on Sunday, according to a running tally by the US-based Johns Hopkins University. The university's data showed a total of 1,700,354 people won the battle against COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. The...

A United Arab Emirates (UAE) company purchased six helicopters and two boats to raid ships off Libya in a move to support Libyan renegade commander Khalifa Haftar, a UN panel revealed. According to confidential letters by a Panel of Experts, under the Security Council's Libya Sanctions...

Seven members of the Daesh group escaped from a small prison in northeast Syria Sunday, with four recaptured and a search continuing for the remaining three, said Syrian state media and an official with the main Kurdish-led U.S.-backed force in the region. The militants fled from a jail on...

The Premier League hopes "Project Restart" will move a step closer to becoming reality Monday when clubs hold an emergency meeting to vote on a return to group training amid the coronavirus pandemic. Should at least 14 of the 20 clubs agree that safety protocols are sufficient, players are...

Late-night strikes on a position held by Iranian militias and their allies in eastern Syria killed seven fighters, a war monitor said Sunday. It was not immediately clear who carried out the strikes on "a base" controlled by Iranian forces and their proxies near the Syrian-Iraqi border town...

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah signed a power-sharing deal on Sunday, ending a bitter months-long feud that plunged the country into political crisis. The breakthrough, which sees Abdullah heading peace talks with the Taliban, comes as Afghanistan battles a...

(Zaman Al Wals)- The value of the Syrian pound (Lira) has been in hysterical dwindling on Sunday following new defiant statements by Bashar al-Assad's cousin and Telecom tycoon  Rami Makhlouf  who has refused to step down and warned of imminent collapse for the ailing economy....

Syrian tycoon Rami Makhlouf said Sunday that authorities had set a deadline for him to resign from the country's leading mobile operator Syriatel or it would revoke the company's license, but that he would not step down. In a video, the third the businessmen has issued bringing into the...

In separate, stark warnings, two major European leaders have bluntly told their citizens that the world needs to adapt to live with the coronavirus and cannot wait to be saved by the development of a vaccine. The comments by Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and British Prime...

Turkey’s health ministry says 41 more people have died from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll to 4,096. The death rate is the lowest registered since the end of March. Minister Fahrettin Koca also tweeted Saturday that 1,610 new infections were confirmed, which makes...

The Chinese ambassador to Israel was found dead in his home north of Tel Aviv Sunday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said. No cause of death was given and Israeli police said it was investigating. Du Wei, 58, was appointed envoy in February in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. He...

Even as U.S. sanctions, unemployment, inflation and low oil prices batter the Iranian economy, there seems to be at least one refuge for investors. The Tehran Stock Exchange has seen gains of 225 percent in the last year, with sharp increases even as the country struggled with one of the...

Tucked away in a Moscow office block, the laboratory could pass unnoticed were it not for the line of people waiting, as Russia rolls out mass testing for coronavirus. While those in line are observing social distancing, they do not have symptoms of coronavirus. They have come to the...