DEIR EL-BALAH (PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES) When 12-year-old Abdel Rahman Nofel was shot in the leg near the Gaza border, he thought he would never play football again. But on an artificial pitch in the coastal enclave, the young amputee controlled the ball, leaned heavily on his crutches and took a shot. …

WASHINGTON White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Sunday defended Donald Trump against accusations that he was inciting violence against a Muslim congresswoman after the president tweeted a video of her spliced with footage of the 9/11 attacks. Ilhan Omar, a Democratic lawmaker from Minnesota, has been at the center …

ROME An Italian man held hostage in Syria since April 2016 has been freed and is returning home, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Friday. Sergio Zanotti, a businessman from Brescia, was seized in southern Turkey near the Syrian border three years ago, his family said. Very little news was …

BEGUSARAI Seven persons including a minor girl were killed and two others injured when a speeding truck rammed into a roadside hut in Bihar’s Begusarai district on Friday, police said. The driver of a wheat laden truck lost control over the vehicle and it rammed into a roadside hut near Koriya Nav …

LONDON An Irish international human rights lawyer who was caught on camera making abusive rants at Air India crew after she was refused alcohol on a flight from Mumbai to London has been jailed for six months in the UK. Simone Burns, was described as “drunk and obnoxious” during a hearing at Isleworth …

KABUL The Taliban besieged an Afghan government and army compound in a remote western province for a second day Friday, killing at least 12 more troops, according to local officials who issued a dramatic warning, saying those inside the compound were running out of ammunition. The latest fatalities brought the …

HASAKEH (SYRIA) Young children nursing severe facial burns, others suffering from malnutrition — an exodus of jihadist families and civilians from the Islamic State group’s vanquished final enclave is overwhelming eastern Syria’s hospitals. A handful of health facilities in the Kurdish-administered northeast receive dozens of patients every day, often including …

VIENNA The U.N. atomic watchdog policing Iran’s nuclear deal has inspected what Israel’s prime minister called a “secret atomic warehouse” in Tehran, three diplomats familiar with the agency’s work said. In a speech at the United Nations in September Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who vehemently opposes the deal, called …

LONDON Flooding has caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to Iranian agriculture, an official said on Thursday, as the parliament speaker questioned whether government funds would be adequate to compensate communities and farmers About 1,900 cities and villages have been affected by floods and exceptionally heavy rains since …

WASHINGTON NATO said Thursday it was taking new action to counter Russia’s “aggression,” finding a united message amid other differences within the Western alliance on its 70th anniversary. Closing two days of talks in Washington, foreign ministers from the 29-nation alliance said in a joint statement that they face “an …