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  BEIRUT / AP Syrian opposition fighters will be allowed to leave the last rebel-held neighborhood in the city of Homs under a Russia-backed deal signed on Monday, a Syrian official and an activist said. According to Talal Barrazi, the governor of Homs province where the city of Homs is the capital, the deal is to be carried out within ...

  JERUSALEM / AP Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs said on Monday it denied a prominent British boycott activist’s entry into the country. Revital Yakin-Karkovsky, a senior ministry official, said Hugh Lanning of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was prohibited on Sunday from entering Israel because his organization had close ties to the Hamas militant group and was one of the ...

  MOGADISHU / AP A suicide car bomber detonated near a hotel in Somalia’s capital Monday morning, killing at least six people and injuring four others, police said. The bomber detonated near the Weheliye hotel on the busy Maka Almukarramah road, Capt. Mohamed Hussein said. Ambulances rushed to the scene. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Top Senate Democrats are warning Republicans controlling Congress against adding billions of dollars for President Donald Trump’s US-Mexico border wall to an upcoming $1 trillion-plus catchall spending package. The warning from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others came in a Monday letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The letter also warns against adding ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway says she doesn’t have any evidence to support President Donald Trump’s claim that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phone lines during the election. Instead, Conway is pointing to recent revelations about other government surveillance to suggest it was possible Obama used a different technique. Her response was unlikely to tamp ...

  LONDON / AP Scotland’s leader will seek authority to hold a new independence referendum in the next two years because Britain is dragging Scotland out of the European Union against its will, she said on Monday. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said that she would move quickly to give voters a new chance to leave the United Kingdom because Scotland ...

  Rex Tillerson is off to an agonizingly slow start as secretary of state. That matters, because if Tillerson doesn’t develop a stronger voice, control of foreign policy is likely to move increasingly toward Stephen Bannon, the insurgent populist who is chief White House strategist. Tillerson’s State Department has been in idle gear these past two months. He doesn’t have ...

  The odd thing about India’s stock market rally is just how little faith investors have in it. The Nifty 50 Index is barely 2% away from its all-time intraday high, but unlike the S&P 500 Index, which has closed at records 13 times this year, the Indian benchmark is struggling to break free of scepticism. Given the froth in ...

  Chinese President Xi Jinping seems interested in embracing the role of global steward — champion of the liberal political and economic order the U.S. administration seems uninterested in promoting. Now is his moment to prove he’s serious. China’s erstwhile client North Korea has become an urgent threat to stability — Xi’s stated top priority — from one end of ...

  Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) clinched a landslide victory in key state elections that are seen as a referendum on the performance of Modi’s three-year-old government. BJP won 311 out of 403 seats in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state. The historic verdict would boost Modi’s chances of winning another term as India’s prime minister in ...