U.S.-led air strikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria have damaged or destroyed 3,222 targets since August, including 58 tanks, 184 Humvees, 673 fighting positions and 980 buildings or barracks, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.
A new Syrian opposition group linked to a prominent cleric said on Thursday President Bashar al-Assad would have to step down as part of any political solution to the civil war, setting out its position ahead of possible peace talks in Moscow this month.
A ship carrying hundreds of migrants has been abandoned by its crew in rough seas in the Mediterranean off Italy's south coast in the second such incident in three days, the Italian coastguard said on Friday.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad visited a district on the outskirts of Damascus and thanked soldiers fighting "in the face of terrorism", his office said on Twitter late on Wednesday, posting pictures of the rare trip.
Since 2001 the United States has tried virtually every strategy available to persuade Pakistan's army to take the threat of militancy more seriously, but 12 years and $28 billion in aid later, all the American approaches are widely viewed as having failed.
Israel's foreign minister on Thursday described as a gimmick a Palestinian-proposed U.N. Security Council draft resolution that calls for a peace deal within a year and an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories by the end of 2017.
The man who killed a Canadian soldier and then stormed the Parliament in October may not have been acting alone, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Wednesday.
The beheading of journalists by Islamist militants in Syria this year showed that reporters face a dangerous new threat, media freedom organization Reporters Without Borders said on Tuesday.
India on Tuesday declared a ban on Islamic State, days after having detained an engineer for running a popular Twitter account extolling the militant group's military campaign.
President Barack Obama used a holiday season visit to a U.S. military base on Monday to issue a tough warning to Islamic State militants, saying a U.S.-led coalition will permit no safe haven to the group and will destroy it eventually.
Heavily armed Australian police stormed a Sydney cafe early on Tuesday morning and freed a number of hostages being held there at gunpoint, in a dramatic end to a 16-hour siege in which three people including the attacker were killed.
Dozens of hostages were trapped inside a central Sydney cafe on Monday, with local television showing some being forced to hold up a black flag with white Arabic writing in the window, raising fears of an attack linked to Islamic militants.
Islamic State's self-declared police force in western Syria decapitated four men after accusing them of blasphemy, a rights group monitoring the Syrian conflict said on Saturday.
U.S. lawmakers were expected on Friday to approve new sanctions on Russian weapons companies and investors in the country's high-tech oil projects, putting more U.S. pressure on President Vladimir Putin for interference in eastern Ukraine.
Germany's justice system is struggling to cope with waves of suspected jihadists returning from Syria and the speed at which young Muslims are being radicalized, the top public prosecutor said on Thursday.
Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban for refusing to quit school, and Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi received their Nobel Peace Prizes on Wednesday after two days of celebration honoring their work for children's rights.
A United Arab Emirates (UAE) court convicted 11 men including UAE, Syrian and Comoros nationals of helping to form an al Qaeda affiliate and sending fighters to join Syrian rebel groups, newspapers reported on Wednesday.
A senior leader of al Qaeda in Yemen has criticized beheadings by Islamic State (IS) fighters as un-Islamic, and said his own group had banned such acts.
Syria asked the United Nations Security Council on Monday to impose sanctions on neighboring Israel, a day after accusing the Jewish state of bombing areas near Damascus international airport and in the town of Dimas, near the border with Lebanon.
Divisions among the veto-wielding powers of the U.N. Security Council are harming the world's children and sowing the seeds of future conflicts, the head of the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Monday.
President Barack Obama on Friday nominated veteran defense expert Ashton Carter as his defense secretary, a job that will require him to tackle messy wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and try to fend off potentially damaging budget cuts.
