Syrian opposition figures head to Moscow this week although they are unlikely to welcome Russia's plan for a new anti-jihadist coalition that would include embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Moscow has since June been pushing a plan for a broader grouping than the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) group, to include Syria's government and its allies.

On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, an African-American man, was stopped for drunk driving by a white officer in Los Angeles, touching off six days of riots that left 34 dead and changed America.

Fifty years later, many things have changed but the friction between police and the public remains.

The White House responded with ill-disguised anger Friday to news that Chuck Schumer, a key Democratic ally in the Senate, will oppose the landmark nuclear deal with Iran.

In a statement -- purposely announced at the same time as the blockbuster Republican presidential debate Thursday -- Schumer said planned inspections of Iran's nuclear sites were not intrusive enough and would allow it to become a threshold nuclear state.

The release of a French hostage held in Yemen with the help of Oman has once again highlighted the tiny sultanate's unique role as a discreet Gulf mediator.

France announced late Thursday that Isabelle Prime, who worked on a World Bank-funded project in Yemen, had been freed by her abductors after nearly six months in captivity.

The United States and Turkey are forging an alliance of convenience to deal with the Syrian crisis, cooperating to create a zone free of jihadists despite sharp disagreements over the role of Kurdish fighters.

After months of criticism that it was not doing enough to fight jihadists from the Islamic State group, Turkey last month made an about-turn in its strategy that was hailed by Washington and NATO.

In the nervous aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing 70 years ago, citizens spent decades on alert for a nuclear war that would wipe out billions in a radioactive firestorm and render Earth uninhabitable.

Yet the apocalypse never came.

In a West Bank hill village where an 18-month-old Palestinian child burned to death last week in a firebombing by suspected Jewish settlers, the boy's uncle fears for his own children's safety.

"They are still young; they don't understand anything yet, but they are already very scared because they saw their cousin being burnt," Hassan Dawabsha said in front of his brother's gutted home in Duma, nestled in the hills near the Jordan Valley.

Life in the Syrian city of Hasakeh, divided between allied Kurdish and regime forces, comes at a price: two lots of military service and double the taxes.

Raed, a Syrian Arab living in the northeastern city, avoids passing through checkpoints run by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG).

The 20-year-old law student says he has had enough of fruitless protests in support of Egypt's deposed Islamist president, two years of a losing struggle with police.

Now he wants to join the extremists of the Islamic State group who are battling the army in the Sinai Peninsula.

After billions of dollars spent and more than 10,000 extremist fighters killed, the Islamic State group is fundamentally no weaker than it was when the U.S.-led bombing campaign began a year ago, American intelligence agencies have concluded.

The military campaign has prevented Iraq's collapse and put the Islamic State under increasing pressure in northern Syria, particularly squeezing its self-proclaimed capital in Raqqa. But intelligence analysts see the overall situation as a strategic stalemate: The Islamic State remains a well-funded extremist army able to replenish its ranks with foreign jihadis as quickly as the U.S. can eliminate them. Meanwhile, the group has expanded to other countries, including Libya, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Afghanistan.