When India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last visited the White House in 2009 he was feted at President Barack Obama's first state dinner, a star-studded affair that reflected the excitement about blooming ties between the two big democraci

Al Qaeda-linked fighters and a rival Syrian rebel group declared a truce on Friday after two days of clashes near the Turkish frontier in which the militant Islamists overran a border town, rebels said.

Iran is on course to develop a nuclear bomb within six months and time has run out for further negotiations, a senior Israeli minister said.

Egyptian security forces were hunting for supporters of deposed President Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood on Friday after retaking control of a town near Cairo in a crackdown on Islamists.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif reiterated on Tuesday his country will free former Afghan Taliban No. 2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, but that details of his release would be determined after he returned to Pakistan later this week.

Diplomats from five key nations kicked off talks on Tuesday on a Western-drafted U.N. Security Council resolution to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons even as France and Russia clashed over Moscow's insistence that Syrian President Bashar al

Philippine forces freed scores of civilian hostages on Tuesday as fighting subsided in a port city where hundreds of rogue Muslim guerrillas have been battling for more than a week.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on September 30, an Israeli official said on Tuesday, for talks expected to focus on Iran's nuclear program.

The United States, Britain and France warned President Bashar al-Assad on Monday that there would be consequences if he failed to hand over Syria's chemical weapons, and said a U.N. report on the August 21 sarin gas attack left little doubt that

South Korean workers crossed into North Korea on Monday as the joint Kaesong industrial zone restarted operations five months after being shuttered by rising military tensions and threats of war.

The United States, France and Britain agreed on Monday to step up pressure on President Bashar al-Assad to stick to the terms of a deal under which Syria is to give up its huge arsenal of chemical weapons and avoid U.S. military strikes.

A date could be set soon for new talks with global powers over Tehran's nuclear program but Iran will not sacrifice its rights or interests for the sake of a solution to the dispute, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Friday.

Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged small-scale attacks inside the United States to "bleed America economically", adding he hoped eventually to see a more significant strike, according to the SITE monitoring service.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov agreed on Friday to push again for an international conference aimed at ending Syria's civil war.

America's top military officer General Martin Dempsey has already seen one Middle Eastern civil war. He is much more cautious about involvement in another.

Satellite imagery suggests North Korea has restarted a research reactor capable of producing plutonium for weapons at its Yongbyon nuclear complex, a U.S. research institute and a U.S. official said on Wednesday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Wednesday against a U.S. strike on Syria, saying such action risked escalating the conflict beyond that country and unleashing terrorist attacks.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Wednesday he hoped that a U.S. promise to pursue diplomacy to remove the threat of chemical weapons in Syria was "serious", the state news agency IRNA reported.

A judge will deliver his sentence on Friday against four men convicted of killing a woman they gang-raped and tortured on a bus in New Delhi, a case that triggered outrage in India and widespread demands for the guilty to be hanged.

Syria accepted a Russian proposal on Tuesday to give up chemical weapons but U.S. President Barack Obama said it was too early to tell if the initiative would succeed and he vowed to keep military forces at the ready to strike if diplomacy fails.

The European Union must hand back some powers to nation states while strengthening its role in other areas if it is to regain public trust and reverse a tide of skepticism in countries like Britain, the president of the European Parliament said.

France is to put forward a U.N. Security Council draft resolution for Syria to give up its chemical weapons, quickly turning a Russian idea into a full-blown diplomatic proposal that could avert Western military strikes.

Four men were found guilty on Tuesday of the fatal gang-rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi, a crime that shook India to its core and forced Indians to confront the issue of rampant sexual violence in a society undergoing wrenching change.

An al Qaeda affiliate has claimed responsibility for a series of car bombs that killed around 60 people in predominantly Shi'ite districts of the Iraqi capital last week.

Muslim rebels took 30 civilian hostages in the southern Philippines on Monday and held security forces in a standoff as part of a drive to derail peace talks, officials said.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad denied that he was behind a chemical weapons attack on the Syrian people, as the White House on Sunday pressed ahead with the uphill effort of persuading Congress to approve a military strike to punish Assad.

South Korea banned all fishery imports from a swath of Japan around the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant on Friday, dealing another blow to Tokyo's credibility on the eve of the capital's bid to host the Olympics.

For the first time in at least three years, European leaders have found themselves out of the economic firing line at a Group of 20 summit, with emerging nations' troubles taking the spotlight.

U.S. President Barack Obama faced growing pressure from Russia's Vladimir Putin and other world leaders on Thursday to decide against launching military strikes in Syria, which many of them fear would hurt the global economy and push up oil price

Egypt's interior minister survived an assassination attempt on Thursday when a bomb blew up as his convoy drove through Cairo's Nasr City district, state media and security officials said.