A Taliban suicide bomber and six gunmen attacked the Afghan parliament on Monday as lawmakers met to consider a new defense minister, and another district in the volatile north fell to the militants as they intensified a summer offensive.
The United States and China held "candid and to-the-point" talks at the start of three days of cabinet-level meetings aimed at managing the highly complex relationship between the world's two biggest economies, a senior U.S. official said.
Hundreds of Syrian refugees who had fled into Turkey crossed back on Monday, witnesses said, as a border gate reopened a few days after Islamic State militants were ousted from the frontier town of Tel Abyad forces by Syrian Kurds.
The U.S. government's appeals process for reviewing flood insurance claim disputes is riddled with flaws, but there is no evidence of systematic underpayments by insurers to flood victims, an investigation by U.S. Senate staffers has found.
