Nine Arab countries have been invited to discuss relations with Syria in Saudi Arabia this week, the Qatari foreign ministry said yesterday, as efforts mount to reduce Damascus’s long isolation.

At least 50 people were killed in central Myanmar yesterday in an air strike by the military on an event attended by opponents to its rule, according to media and members of a local resistance movement.

Russian forces pounded frontline cities in eastern Ukraine with air strikes and artillery attacks, while US officials stepped up efforts to locate the source of a leak of classified US documents, including those on Ukrainian counter-offensive plans.

Israeli soldiers shot dead two Palestinian gunmen who opened fire at a military post near a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank yesterday, Israel’s Defence Minister said.

South Korea said yesterday that information contained in a purportedly leaked US confidential document that appeared to be based on internal discussions among top South Korean security officials was “untrue” and “altered”.

A Kuwaiti media outlet has unveiled a virtual news presenter generated using artificial intelligence, with plans for it to read online bulletins.

Estonia, a small country in Northern Europe with a population of just 1.3 million, has emerged as a global leader in building a digital society. The country's success in creating a high-tech infrastructure has earned it the nickname "e-Estonia."

A 23-year-old bank employee armed with a rifle shot dead five colleagues and wounded nine other people at his workplace in Louisville on Monday while livestreaming the attack on social media, police said

Five people were killed and at least six others hospitalised following a shooting targeting a bank yesterday in downtown Louisville, in the US state of Kentucky, according to police who said the assailant had been neutralised.

At least two migrants have died and around 20 others are missing after their vessel sank in the Mediterranean between Tunisia and Italy, German aid group ResQship told AFP.

The Philippines will not allow “any offensive actions” from the bases it has opened to US troops, President Ferdinand Marcos said yesterday.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Vietnam later this week in the latest bid to build relations with a growing US partner as tensions flare with China over Taiwan, the State Department said yesterday.

Russian forces are pressing attacks in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, focusing on two cities and pounding Ukrainian positions with air strikes and artillery barrages, Kyiv said yesterday.

Israeli forces killed a Palestinian teenager and injured two other people in the West Bank yesterday, the Palestinian health ministry said, in what the army described as a raid to arrest a “terror suspect”.

Five people were killed and eight others were wounded in a shooting attack on Monday at a bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, the city's police department said.

Israeli forces killed one Palestinian in a raid on a refugee camp near Jericho in the occupied West Bank on Monday, the Palestinian health ministry said.

Highly classified military and intelligence documents that appeared online, with details ranging from Ukraine's air defences to Israel's Mossad spy agency, have United States officials scrambling to identify the leak's source, with some Western security experts and US officials saying they suspected it could be someone from the US

An avalanche on Sunday near Mont Blanc in southeastern France swept four people to their deaths and left two more missing, the officials said

French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview published yesterday that Europe must not be a “follower” of either the US or China on Taiwan, saying that the bloc risks entanglement in “crises that aren’t ours”.

A 50-year-old man and his 11-year-old daughter were killed after Russian missiles struck a house in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, officials said yesterday.