Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a "strategic partnership" with Syria on Friday during talks with President Bashar al-Assad, who is seeking financial support to help rebuild his devastated country.

The leaders met on the eve of the Asian Games opening ceremony, which Assad will attend as part of his first visit to China since 2004.

Lebanese security agencies are investigating a late-night shooting outside the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy just north of Beirut. No one was hurt in the small-arms fire.

The shots erupted near the entrance to the embassy compound in Beirut's northeastern suburb of Awkar on Wednesday night. No one claimed responsibility for the shooting and the motives behind it were not known.

The Israeli military said tanks struck two structures inside a demilitarized zone in Syria, claiming the buildings violated a half-century-old cease-fire agreement between the two countries.

The structures, it said, were being used by the Syrian military, amounting to what the army called a "clear violation" of the 1974 cease-fire. The Israeli army did not provide any information on what the structures were used for or when they were built.

Anti-government demonstrators took to the streets of Yerevan on Friday for a third day to protest the government's handling of the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh.

On Wednesday, Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh agreed to lay down their arms and dismantle their military, following a lightning offensive by Baku.

Israeli authorities are trying to figure out how a heavily armored, but unarmed, tank was stolen from a military training zone after finding it discarded in a junkyard.

The Israeli Merkava 2 tank disappeared from a training zone in northern Israel near the coastal city of Haifa, the Israeli army said Wednesday. The training zone is closed to the public when in use, but is otherwise accessible to passersby.

Nearly a week after a cease-fire agreement between warring factions in Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp brought a fragile peace, hundreds of displaced residents see no immediate prospects of return.

Some have lost their houses, while others do not trust that the calm will hold. For many, it's not the first time they have been forced to flee their homes.

Beijing's top diplomat told President Vladimir Putin that China and Russia must work to strengthen cooperation in the face of a "complex international situation", Chinese state media reported Thursday.

Speaking at a meeting with Putin in Saint Petersburg, at which the Russian leader accepted an invitation to visit China next month, Wang Yi said the "world is rapidly moving toward multipolarity".

Talks between Armenian separatists and Azerbaijan on integrating the breakaway territory began Thursday, after the fighters from the Nagorno-Karabakh region agreed to lay down their arms in a ceasefire deal.

Images distributed by Azerbaijani state media showed the Armenian separatist delegation sitting around a table with negotiators dispatched by Baku to resolve the decades-long dispute over the breakaway mountainous territory.

Syrian President Bashar Assad arrived in China on Thursday on his first visit to the country since the start of Syria's 12-year conflict during which Beijing has been one of his main backers.

China's foreign ministry said Assad would attend the opening ceremony of the Asian Games, an international sports event beginning Saturday in the eastern city of Hangzhou.

Russian missiles pounded cities across Ukraine early Thursday morning, according to Ukrainian authorities, starting fires, killing at least two people and trapping others under rubble.

The early morning missile attack was Russia's largest in over a month, and came a day after reports of sabotage at a Russian military airfield in Chkalovsk near Moscow.