Russia's military says rebels in Syria's eastern Ghouta start new offensives after midday, during a five-hour ceasefire, Interfax news agency reports citing a Russian general.

Turkish allegations of Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian support for the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) threaten to turn Turkey's military offensive against Syrian Kurds aligned with the PKK into a regional imbroglio.

Suspected Russian jets kill at least 20 civilians and wounds dozens when they dropped bombs on two residential buildings in a besieged rebel enclave east of the Syrian capital, residents and a war monitor says.

The son of Syrian President Bashar Assad said people who call his father a dictator don’t understand the reality of his country and that the population is united with him in fighting “invaders,” Brazil’s O Globo newspaper reported.

Rock star Sting headlined a concert in Paris' Bataclan music hall on Saturday to mark the venue's reopening a year after three Islamist militants gunned down 90 revellers in France's bloodiest terror attack.

A boom of interest in cricket in Germany, fuelled by the influx of asylum seekers from Pakistan and Afghanistan, is a tale poised to hit the silver screen.

Around 120 asylum seekers and refugees in Switzerland will next week compete in a football tournament organised with the backing of UEFA.

As the world is now well aware, Syria has been consumed by violence for years now. What people are less aware of, however, is why it has been raging for so long.

According to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria…. intelligence documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012”, some US allies “were arming, training and funding radical Jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow the Assad's Shia allied regime.

The human consequences of the education crisis among Syrian refugees are impossible to miss. They are apparent in the growing army of child labourers picking vegetables in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley or working at garment factories in Turkey, where a half-million refugees are out of school.

More than 50 State Department diplomats signs an internal memo sharply critical of US policy in Syria, calling for military strikes against President Bashar al-Assad's government to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country's civil war.

Mouhamad, a 40-year-old dentist and poet, lived in Aleppo, Syria, for many years.

Terrorist attacks and the total number of deaths increased in Bangladesh in 2015, according to the US State Department.

The US, UK and France urge the UN to begin air drops of humanitarian aid to besieged areas in Syria.

The chief negotiator of Syria's main opposition umbrella group, Mohammed Alloush, has resigned over what he called the failure of peace talks.

Islamic State fighters capture territory from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border and inch closer to a town on a supply route for foreign-backed insurgents fighting the jihadists, a monitoring group said.

New satellite imagery appears to reveal extensive damage to a strategically significant airbase in central Syria used by Russian forces after an attack by so-called Islamic State (IS).

Islamic State (IS) is losing territory, its finances are being drained and the number of foreign fighters recruited has reportedly down to a trickle, dropped by as much as 90 percent from a high of 2,000 a month in the past year.

The Syrian government has accused Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia of being behind a wave of bombings in the coastal cities of Tartous and Jableh.

Bomb blasts kill scores of people in Jableh and Tartous on Syria's Mediterranean coast with many others wounded in the government-controlled territory that hosts Russian military bases, monitors and state media said.