Russia has positioned about a half dozen tanks at an airfield at the center of a military buildup in Syria, two U.S. officials said on Monday, adding that the intentions of Moscow's latest deployment of heavy military equipment were unclear.
Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri called on young Muslim men in the United States and other Western countries to carry out attacks inside there and urged greater unity between militants.
President Barack Obama has directed his administration to prepare to take in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year, the White House said on Thursday.
Russian forces have begun participating in military operations in Syria in support of government troops, three Lebanese sources familiar with the political and military situation there said on Wednesday.
At least 850,000 people are expected to cross the Mediterranean seeking refuge in Europe this year and next, the United Nations said on Tuesday, giving estimates that already look conservative.
The overpowering stench of the rubbish piling up in Lebanon's streets has become a potent symbol of the political rot protesters blame not only for the garbage crisis but a gridlocked sectarian power system unable to meet citizens’ most basic needs, from electricity to water, health to education.
While the desperate flight of Syrians from their country's war was dominating news bulletins this summer, yet another diplomatic push to end the four-year-old conflict was quietly running into the sand.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, fellow Gulf states raced to shelter thousands of displaced Kuwaitis. Fast forward 25 years, and the homeless from Syria's nearby war have found scant refuge in the Arab world's richest states.
Austria said on Sunday it planned to end emergency measures that have allowed thousands of refugees stranded in Hungary into Austria and Germany since Saturday and move step by step "towards normality".
Hungary said on Friday it would send thousands of migrants by bus to the border with Austria, appearing to capitulate to crowds who broke away from riot police and struck out on foot for western Europe in a day of chaos.
Conflicts across the Middle East and North Africa are preventing more than 13 million children from attending school, leaving their hopes and futures shattered, the United Nations Children's Fund said in a report issued on Thursday.
Russia is delaying the launch of an international investigation aimed at assigning blame for chemical weapon attacks in Syria, U.N. Security Council diplomats said on Wednesday, though Moscow's U.N. envoy said the holdup was for technical reasons.
A ship bringing about 1,800 migrants and refugees from an eastern Greek island to the port of Piraeus arrived on Tuesday night, the Greek coastguard said.
European Union ministers were summoned on Sunday to meet in two weeks' time to seek urgent solutions to a migration crisis unprecedented in the bloc's history, as the mounting death toll on land and sea forced governments to respond.
The number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe has passed 300,000 this year, up from 219,000 in the whole of 2014, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday.
Dozens of protesters shouted at Chancellor Angela Merkel and waved placards with the slogan "traitor" on Wednesday when she visited an eastern German town where anti-refugee protests erupted into violence at the weekend.
The United States announced tighter security measures on Thursday for visitors from the 38 countries in its visa waiver program, which include European nations that have seen hundreds of residents traveling to fight with militant groups in Syria and Iraq.
Russia and the United States have not been able to agree on a common approach to fighting Islamic State, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday, after his second meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in recent days.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will meet for a second time in three days on Wednesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who has been trying to bring about a rapprochement between Syria and regional states to forge an alliance to fight Islamic State militants.
