After insurgents toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad this month, many senior officials and members of his dreaded intelligence and security services appear to have melted away. Activists say some of them have managed to flee the country while others went to hide in their hometowns.

For more than five decades, the Assad family has ruled Syria with an iron grip, locking up those who dared question their power in the country's notorious prisons, where rights groups say inmates were regularly tortured or killed.

A severely hobbled Hezbollah was in no position to help defend former Syrian President Bashar Assad, a longtime ally, from the lightning-fast insurgency that toppled him. With Assad gone, the militant group based in Lebanon is even weaker.

Hezbollah was dealt a major blow during 14 months of war with Israel. The toppling of Assad, who had strong ties to Iran, has now crippled its ability to bounce back by cutting off a vital weapons-smuggling route through Syria.

Kylian Mbappé will miss one Spanish league game with a leg injury but Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti hopes his striker will recover from in time to play the Intercontinental Cup final next week.

Ancelotti said Friday that the left-thigh injury that Mbappé sustained this week will rule him out of Saturday's La Liga match at Rayo Vallecano.

Draw made Friday by FIFA for European qualifying groups for the 2026 World Cup:

Group A: Germany or Italy (winner of Nations League QF), Slovakia, Northern Ireland, Luxembourg.

SpaceX is launching a new mission: making its Starbase site a new Texas city.

Billionaire Elon Musk 's company on Thursday sent a letter to local officials requesting an election to turn what it calls Starbase — the South Texas site where SpaceX builds and launches its massive Starship rockets — into an incorporated city. Residents of the area known as Starbase submitted the petition, according to the company.

Veteran documentarian Alex Gibney, who in a decades-long career has tackled many a thorny issue, wasn't planning a film about Israel — until one day last year, when a stunning leak fell into his hands.

The leak turned out to be more like a deluge.

Chinese leaders met this week to plot economic policy for the coming year, sketching out plans to raise government spending and relax Beijing's monetary policy to encourage more investment and consumer spending.

Leaders of the ruling Communist Party wrapped up their two-day Central Economic Work Conference on Thursday with praise for President Xi Jinping's guidance and a pledge to "enrich and refine the policy toolbox" and defuse risks facing the world's second-largest economy. One of the biggest: threats by President-elect Donald Trump to sharply raise tariffs on imports from China once he takes office.

The U.S. has updated a decades-old science and technology agreement with China to reflect their growing rivalry for technological dominance. The new agreement, signed Friday after many months of negotiations, has a narrower scope and additional safeguards to minimize the risk to national security.

The State Department said the agreement sustains intellectual property protections, establishes new guardrails to protect the safety and security of researchers and "advances U.S. interests through newly established and strengthened provisions on transparency and data reciprocity."

Iran's capital and outlying provinces have faced rolling power blackouts for weeks in October and November, with electricity cuts disrupting people's lives and businesses. And while several factors are likely involved, some suspect cryptocurrency mining has played a role in the outages.

Iran economy has been hobbled for years by international sanctions over its advancing nuclear program. The country's fuel reserves have plummeted, with the government selling off more to cover budget shortfalls as wars rage in the Middle East and Tehran grapples with mismanagement.

The incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump is likely to bring big changes for one of the oldest sectors of the U.S. economy — seafood — and some in the industry believe the returning president will be more responsive to its needs.

Economic analysts paint a more complicated picture, as they fear Trump's pending trade hostilities with major trading partners Canada and China could make an already pricy kind of protein more expensive to consumers. Conservationists also fear Trump's emphasis on government deregulation could jeopardize fish stocks that are already in peril.