The UN Security Council on Wednesday endorsed a UN-brokered agreement among Libya's warring factions to form a national unity government, a deal Western powers hope will bring stability and help to combat a growing Islamic State presence.

Syria's regime yesterday said it was ready to take part in new talks in Geneva aimed at ending the war but appeared to make its participation conditional on which opposition groups will attend.

Japan yesterday said it was investigating the reported kidnapping of a Japanese journalist in Syria by an armed group, after two of its citizens were beheaded

China should play a more active role in fighting Islamic State, a senior figure in a body that advises Iran's Supreme Leader said yesterday, according to the country's Fars news agency.

Iraqi security forces yesterday advanced into the centre of Ramadi for a final push aimed at retaking the city they lost to the Islamic State group in May, officials said.

Military planes have dropped food and ammunition to besieged Afghan forces battling to push Taliban insurgents out of Sangin, officials said yesterday, two days after the emboldened militants stormed the opium-growing district.

Islamic State militants in eastern Afghanistan have taken to the airwaves to win recruits as they try to build strength and replace the Taliban as the leading force in the Islamist insurgency.

Clashes intensified yesterday as the Taliban pressed an offensive to capture a key district in Helmand's opium-growing heartland, a day after an official warned the entire southern Afghan province was on the brink of collapse.

The killing of minorities by so-called Islamic State should be recognised as genocide, more than 60 parliamentarians say in a letter to the UK PM.

Israel's Interior Minister Silvan Shalom has resigned after a series of sexual harassment allegations.

A Palestinian tried to attack Israeli soldiers with a knife in the West Bank yesterday and was shot dead, the army said, the latest incident in more than two-months of violence.

Yemeni pro-government forces and rebels completed an exchange of hundreds of detainees yesterday, an official said, amid a shaky ceasefire on the third day of UN-sponsored peace talks in Switzerland.

New evidence has been released that up to 7,000 Syrians who died in government detention centres in Syria were tortured to death, a rights group said in a report.

Libyan politicians yesterday signed a deal on a unity government despite opposition on both sides, in what the United Nations described as a "first step" towards ending the crisis.

Gunmen have kidnapped at least 27 Qatari hunters in a desert area of Iraq near the Saudi border, officials say.

Egypt said yesterday it still has no evidence that a "terrorist action" had downed a Russian plane at the end of October in the Sinai Peninsula, as stated by

Air pollution in Iran's capital hit its worst level -- for a day without a sandstorm -- in at least nine months yesterday, prompting warnings that all citizens

Saudi voters have elected 20 women for local government seats, according to results, a day after women voted and ran in elections for the first time in the

French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said yesterday that the Islamic State group was spreading from its stronghold on the Libyan coast to the interior of the country with the aim of getting access to oil wells.

Nato has ruled out sending ground troops to fight against Islamic State militants in Syria, Nato General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg told a