This is Beirut 2024-12-18 11:00 - Reading : less than a minute
The first flight since the ouster of Syria's president Bashar al-Assad took off on Wednesday from Damascus airport to Aleppo in the country's north, AFP journalists saw. Forty-three people including journalists were on board the Syrian Air Airbus plane. Assad fled Syria as a lightning rebel offensive launched on November 27 wrested from his ...
This is Beirut 2024-12-18 10:50 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
Rescuers searched desperately for survivors as they sought to assess the full scale of devastation wrought by Cyclone Chido on the French overseas territory of Mayotte, which emerged on Wednesday from a first night spent under curfew. French President Emmanuel Macron "will be in Mayotte on Thursday", his office announced late on Tuesday, as ...
This is Beirut 2024-12-18 09:30 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
Donald Trump European Union Kyiv Volodymyr Zelensky
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meets Wednesday with NATO chief Mark Rutte and key European leaders in Brussels to discuss "next steps" on Russia's war as Donald Trump prepares to take office in the United States. The gathering due in the evening was set to bring together German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Polish leader Donald Tusk, Italian ...
This is Beirut 2024-12-18 09:25 - Reading : 3 minute(s)
Damascus Israel UN Security Council
A UN envoy has warned that Syria's protracted conflict "has not ended yet", even as victorious Islamist-led rebels stepped up contacts with governments that deemed ousted president Bashar al-Assad a pariah. The United Nations' special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, said on Tuesday "there have been significant hostilities in the last two weeks, ...
This is Beirut 2024-12-17 22:50 - Reading : 2 minute(s)
The United States said Tuesday it felt "cautious optimism" on the prospects of reaching a ceasefire in the 14-month war in Gaza, although it acknowledged that similar hopes had been dashed before. Hamas on Tuesday said that talks mediated by Qatar were "serious and positive," a day after Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz described the two ...
This is Beirut 2024-12-17 21:55 - Reading : 2 minute(s)
Murhaf Abu Qasra Hayat Tahrir al-Sham Syria
The military chief of Syria's victorious Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham said on Tuesday it would be "the first" to dissolve its armed wing and integrate into the armed forces. "In any state, all military units must be integrated into this institution," Murhaf Abu Qasra, known by his nom de guerre Abu Hassan al-Hamawi, said in an interview ...
This is Beirut 2024-12-17 19:40 - Reading : 2 minute(s)
Israel Syria Benjamin Netanyahu Mount Hermon
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a security briefing Tuesday atop a strategic Syrian mountain inside the UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights that Israel seized this month, the defense minister said. Netanyahu, Defense Minister Israel Katz and the heads of the armed forces and the domestic security agency visited ...
Nidal Ayoub 2024-12-17 19:16 - Reading : 5 minute(s)
Syria HTS USA European Union Qatar Turkey
This influx appears oddly under the auspices of all the imaginable paradoxes that Syria embodies: international sanctions, foreign interferences (Turkish interventions, Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, etc.), and not least, the fact that talks are being held with the ruling coalition of rebels now in power, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham ...
This is Beirut 2024-12-17 19:00 - Reading : 5 minute(s)
Syria Bashar al-Assad Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
Syria's new rulers stepped up engagement on Tuesday with countries that deemed ousted president Bashar al-Assad a pariah, with the French flag raised at the embassy for the first time in over a decade. Assad fled Syria just over a week ago, as his forces abandoned tanks and other equipment in the face of a lightning offensive spearheaded by the ...
Samar El-Kadi 2024-12-17 18:20 - Reading : 5 minute(s)
Like everywhere else in Syria, the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s totalitarian regime was acclaimed with joy and celebrations in the predominantly Druze southern province of Sweida. While they have historically been close to the regime, the esoteric minority Druze community, making up some 3 to 4% of Syria’s ...
This is Beirut 2024-12-17 18:00 - Reading : 4 minute(s)
Genetic Modification Revivicor United Therapeutics
On a farm in the southern US state of Virginia, David Ayares and his research teams are breeding genetically modified pigs to transplant their organs into human patients. Revivicor, the biotech company Ayares leads, is at the forefront of xenotransplantation research -- the implantation of animal organs into humans -- which aims to solve a ...
This is Beirut 2024-12-17 15:30 - Reading : 6 minute(s)
Damascus European Union United Nations United States Syria Iran
The United Nations humanitarian chief said Tuesday that he was "encouraged" after meetings in Damascus with Syria's new leaders, saying there was a "basis for ambitious scaling-up of vital humanitarian support", as Western diplomatic missions prepare to return to Damascus. "Moment of cautious hope in Syria," Tom ...