Kuwaiti civil servant Nasser Ahmed sits in a luxurious tent, taking advantage of the perks of election campaigning in the emirate seen as a pioneer of democracy in the Gulf.

The middle-aged Ahmed has been worried that austerity measures initiated after oil prices fell sharply will gnaw away at his salary and benefits.

The United States on Monday named a dozen Syrian generals and officers accused of leading attacks on civilian targets and running torture prisons, warning they will one day face justice.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power read out the names at a tense Security Council meeting on Syria, where government forces backed by Russia pressed on with an offensive as the humanitarian crisis reached alarming levels.

Paris prosecutors have opened a probe into the leaking of a confidential document on planned French air strikes in Syria in 2013, which in the end were never carried out, judicial sources said Monday.

The document was obtained by two journalists from the daily Le Monde who recently published a tell-all book based on interviews with Socialist President Francois Hollande.

A Palestinian youth who stabbed and wounded two Israelis in October 2015 was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Monday, an Israeli court said.

Nearly one million people are living under siege in Syria, the U.N. aid chief said Monday, announcing revised figures.

The new figure of 974,080 people marks a dramatic increase from 486,700 Syrians living in besieged areas just six months ago, Stephen O'Brien told the Security Council.

A fragile 48-hour ceasefire in Yemen ended on Monday after failing to stem violence across the country, with each side blaming the other for violating the U.S.-backed truce.

The Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat said on Monday it fired its Baghdad correspondent, a day after printing controversial accusations wrongly attributed to a U.N. spokesman.

Israeli authorities will extend for a second time the detention without charge of a Palestinian journalist accused of belonging to a "terrorist organization", his wife said on Monday.

In a series of heartrending televised hearings, a tribunal in Tunisia has begun the long process of healing the wounds of six decades of dictatorship.

A car bomb attack near a hospital in Libya's second city of Benghazi killed at least four people and wounded 13 others on Monday, a medical source said.