A fresh round of Syrian peace talks is scheduled for mid-June in the Kazakh capital, Syria's envoy to Moscow said Saturday, with sponsors Russia, Iran and Turkey aiming to bolster safe zones in the country.  

Sudan's foreign minister is in Egypt in what could potentially be a prelude to defusing tensions between the two Afro-Arab neighbors over a longtime border dispute.

Ibrahim Ghandour arrived in Cairo late Friday and is scheduled to meet with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi on Saturday. He and his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry will address a joint news conference.

A US-backed Kurdish-Arab alliance has seized new territory west of the Islamic State group's Syrian bastion Raqa, bringing it closer to a final attack on the city, a monitor said Saturday.

Hackers took over the Twitter account of the Bahraini foreign minister on Saturday just 10 days after a cyber attack on the official news agency of neighbouring Qatar.

Hundreds of young people clashed with riot police in northern Morocco Friday, following a general strike called by activists demanding the release of a protest leader. 

Successive Israeli governments have invested billions of dollars over the past 50 years on settlements in the occupied West Bank, making any withdrawal from the Palestinian territory a costly proposition.

Algeria has agreed to take in 41 Syrian refugees trapped since mid-April in a desert area that borders neighbouring Morocco, the foreign ministry said on Thursday.

In Syria's capital these days, people are breathing a little easier. Across Damascus, new shops are sprouting up, business is brisk, and some people who fled the civil war years ago are contemplating a return.

The Syrian war is likely to drag on for years, sustained largely by the intervention and rivalries of foreign powers. But in the seat of President Bashar Assad's government, there is a general feeling that the six-year conflict is winding down.

A car that exploded in a mainly Shiite Muslim city in eastern Saudi Arabia killing its two occupants was carrying munitions, the interior ministry said on Friday.

The US military offered assurances to Turkey on Thursday over supplying arms to Kurdish fighters against the Islamic State group, after Ankara called the move "extremely dangerous."