AFP, DAMASCUS: The United Nations hopes to convene peace talks between Syria’s government and opposition on January 25, it said Saturday, a day after the killing of a powerful rebel leader who supported negotiations. The death of opposition chief Zahran Alloush also appeared to derail a plan to…

AFP, BEIRUT: The killing of Syrian rebel chief Zahran Alloush, fiercely opposed to both the regime and the Islamic State group, has eliminated a key bulwark against the jihadists and could derail UN-brokered peace talks, analysts say. The head of Jaish al-Islam, the foremost rebel group in Damascus…

AFP, BEIRUT: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the secretive leader of the Islamic State group, called for an uprising in Saudi Arabia and pledged to attack Israel, in an audio recording released Saturday and attributed to him. The 24-minute recording would be Baghdadi’s first in seven months, during which…

AFP, TEHRAN: Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani on Sunday said that Muslim countries should strive to improve the world’s opinion of Islam. “We must remove Islam’s negative image from today’s cyber and real space,” he said in Tehran at an international conference on…

AFP, BEIJING: China adopted its first counter-terrorism law Sunday after early drafts of the bill attracted strong criticism for provisions that may tighten media controls and threaten the intellectual property of foreign firms. The legislation comes as Beijing wages a hard-hitting campaign to stamp…

AFP, LONDON: Britain’s government was holding emergency talks Sunday as flooding in northern England forced hundreds of people to leave their homes,…

AFP, CHICAGO: Tornados knocked cars off a highway and flattened homes in Texas, raising the death toll to 25 as a string of powerful storms wreaked havoc across much of the southern United States. At least eight people were killed as tornados struck parts of the densely populated Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex,…

Navid Kermani It was a strangely softened Germany I had left. In the train stations of major cities, foreigners lay on green foam mats amid travelers…

Shen Lu When Liu Yuan started playing the sax in the mid-1980s, few people in China knew what jazz was. “There were only four or five professional jazz musicians in Beijing,” Liu recalls. “It was brutal.” Bars and clubs were rare in the city.  Liu says he had to “beg”…

Vladimir Putin appears shirtless yet again in a bizarre new calendar that’s titled “All Year With The President Of Russia.” The Russian…

It is now 30 years to the day since the mysterious death of Dian Fossey, the primatologist who transformed the way we see gorillas. Before Fossey’s…